Did 'Targets and Terror' Reduce Waiting Times in England for Hospital Care?
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Carol Propper
Abstract
Waiting times have been a central concern in the English NHS, where care is provided free at the point of delivery and is rationed by waiting time. Pro-market reforms introduced in the NHS in the 1990s were not accompanied by large drops in waiting times. As a result, the English government in 2000 adopted the use of an aggressive policy of targets coupled with the publication of waiting times data at the hospital level and strong sanctions for poor performing hospital managers. This regime has been dubbed ‘targets and terror’. We estimate the effect of the English target regime for waiting times for hospital care after 2001 by a comparative analysis with Scotland, a neighbouring country with the same healthcare system that did not adopt the target regime. We estimate difference-in-differences models of the proportion of people on the waiting list who waited over 6, 9 and 12 months. Comparisons between England and Scotland are sensitive to whether published or unpublished data are used but, regardless of the data source, the ‘targets and terror’ regime in England lowered the proportion of people waiting for elective treatment relative to Scotland.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Advances Article
- How Did SCHIP Affect the Insurance Coverage of Immigrant Children?
- The Shape of Demand: What Does It Tell Us about Direct-to-Consumer Marketing of Antidepressants?
- Stemming the Tide? The Effect of Expanding Medicaid Eligibility On Health Insurance Coverage
- Health Care Economics and Policy: An Introduction
- Contributions Article
- Sequential Patterns of Drug Use Initiation - Can We Believe In the Gateway Theory?
- The Effect of the Consolidated Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1985 on Health Care Utilization of Employment Separators
- Did 'Targets and Terror' Reduce Waiting Times in England for Hospital Care?
- Mitigating the Problem of Unmeasured Outcomes in Quality Reports
- Advertising, Free-Riding, and Price Differences in the Market for Prescription Drugs
- Patient Welfare under the Legal Standard of Care
