Measuring and comparing health care waiting times in OECD countries

Luigi Siciliani, Valerie Moran and Michael Borowitz

Health Policy, 2014, vol. 118, issue 3, 292-303

Abstract: Waiting times for elective treatments are a key health-policy concern in several OECD countries. This study describes common measures of waiting times from administrative data across OECD countries. It focuses on common elective procedures, such as hip and knee replacement, and cataract surgery, where waiting times are notoriously long. It provides comparative data on waiting times across 12 OECD countries and presents trends in waiting times over the last decade. Waiting times appear to be low in the Netherlands and Denmark. In the last decade the United Kingdom (in particular England), Finland and the Netherlands have witnessed large reductions in waiting times which can be attributed to a range of policy initiatives, including higher spending, waiting-times target schemes and incentive mechanisms, which reward higher levels of activity. The negative trend in these countries has, however, halted or reversed in recent years. The analysis also emphasizes systematic differences across different waiting-time measures, in particular between the distribution of waiting times of patients treated versus that of patients on the list. Mean waiting times are systematically higher than median waiting times and the difference can be quantitatively large.

Keywords: Waiting times; OECD; Cross-country comparison; Administrative data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (53)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168851014002267
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Measuring and Comparing Health Care Waiting Times in OECD Countries (2013)
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:eee:hepoli:v:118:y:2014:i:3:p:292-303

DOI: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2014.08.011

Access Statistics for this article

Health Policy is currently edited by Katrien Kesteloot, Mia Defever and Irina Cleemput

More articles in Health Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu () and ().