A tour of health care: emergency room, hospital and home

Abstract

My thesis is a small tour of the health care system (emergency room, hospital and home), with special emphasis on providers. Chapter 1 analyzes how emergency room doctors change their behavior when the waiting room is crowded. The outcomes reflect the time spent with the patient, the intensity of treatment, and discharge destination. Chapter 2 extends the previous setting to inpatient care, to determine how doctors react to hospital occupancy level. It identifies doctors’ discharging criteria as a causal factor for the positive relation between occupancy rates and readmissions. The analysis in Chapters 1 and 2 contributes to the doctors’ incentives literature, explaining how these agents behave in the context of a National Health Service, with no financial incentives. Chapter 3 examines the impact of informally providing care to a partner (at home) on the physical and mental health of the carer.