Does waiting times decrease or increase operational costs? Evidence from Portuguese Public Hospitals

• Autor(a) principal: Madeira, André Emanuel dos Santos
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/11451
• topic: Ardl; Custos Operacionais; Hospitais Públicos Empresariais; Portugal; Sns; Tempos de Espera; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

The Portuguese National Health System (SNS) is composed of all public entities offering health services. There has been a successive increase in expenditure in recent years due to a variety of factors which have contributed to a high degree of uncertainty about the evolution of operating costs in Public Business Hospitals (EPE). In this problem of operating costs, we take into account the problem of waiting times, in both consultations and hospital surgeries. The main objective of this research is, therefore, to study the nexus between costs and waiting times between hospitals. Further, we also empirically assess whether this relationship presents a U-shaped behaviour. In this study, we have included a total of 38 Hospitals considered in the SNS, whose monthly period of analysis comprises January 2015 through December 2019 and divides the panel into five groups. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag panel model (ARDL) was used. Thus, the results of this study highlight that longer waiting times have significant effects on hospital costs and suggest that longer waiting times do not merely increase absence rates. At the same time, patients wait for external consultation and/or surgery. Instead, there appear to be significant long-run effects that last beyond the short-run waiting period.