Modelling the dynamics of a public health care system: evidence from time-series data

Fabrizio Iacone, Steve Martin, Luigi Siciliani and Peter C. Smith

Applied Economics, 2012, vol. 44, issue 23, 2955-2968

Abstract: The English National Health Service (NHS) was established in 1948, and has therefore yielded some long time series data on health system performance. Waiting time for inpatient care have been a persistent policy concern since the creation of the NHS. After developing a simple theoretical framework of the dynamic interaction between key indicators of health system performance, we investigate empirically the relationship between hospital activity, waiting time and population characteristics using aggregate time-series data for the NHS over the period 1952 to 2003. Structural Vector Autoregression (S-VAR) suggests that in the long run: higher activity is associated with lower waiting times (elasticity = −0.9); an increase in the elderly population is associated with higher waiting time (elasticity = 1.3). In the short run, higher lagged waiting time leads to higher activity (elasticity = 0.12). We also find that shocks in waiting times are countered by higher activity, so the effect is only temporary.

Date: 2012
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Related works:
Working Paper: Modelling the Dynamics of a Public Health Care System: Evidence from Time-Series Data (2007)
Working Paper: Modelling the Dynamics of a Public Health Care System: Evidence from Time-Series Data (2007)
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DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2011.568407

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