Who Minds the Gate? Comparing the role of non physician providers in the primary care division of labour in Canada & the U.S

Ivy Lynn Bourgeault

Social and Economic Dimensions of an Aging Population Research Papers from McMaster University

Abstract: The gate-keeping role of primary care has been the most fiercely defended of the health care jurisdictions, but more recently it has become a less attractive form of medical practice. This has created an open market for the expansion of a variety of „substitute providers?. In this paper, I present comparative documentary and interview data from Canada and the U.S. on the changes and composition of the primary health care division of labour. What is revealed from this analysis is that: 1) there is a greater reliance on substitute health labour in the U.S. as evidenced by the greater number of and different kinds of primary care providers; 2) there is also a greater propensity in the U.S. towards specialization even of substitute providers; and 3) in both countries, substitute providers resist that label focusing instead on their own model of practice or niche within the primary care division of labour.

Keywords: primary care; division of labour; U.S.-Canada comparison (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2007-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/sedap/p/sedap205.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/sedap/p/sedap205.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/sedap/p/sedap205.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mcm:sedapp:205

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Social and Economic Dimensions of an Aging Population Research Papers from McMaster University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().