Taking Care of the Budget? Practice-level Outcomes during Commissioning Reforms in England

Edward Pinchbeck

SERC Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: I investigate whether vesting budgets with doctors impacts treatment decisions and patients outcomes by exploiting the transitional phase of major recent health care reforms in England that passed budgets to consortia of General Practitioners (GPs). Applying difference-in-difference techniques to balanced treatment and control groups, I find that practices becoming actively responsible for consortia budgets engaged in cost-saving prescribing and referral behaviour but that patients in these practices experienced a relative deterioration in the quality of their care. I discuss a number of explanations for these results, including that the reforms incentivised doctors to reduce quality in order to save cash or that they simply distracted those doctors most closely involved.

Keywords: NHS reforms; commissioning; primary care; health care budgets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 H51 I11 I18 J44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/sercdp0192.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Taking care of the budget? Practice-level outcomesduring commissioning reforms in England (2016)
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:cep:sercdp:0192

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SERC Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().