More doctors, better health? A generalised synthetic control approach to estimating impacts of increasing doctors under Brazil's Mais Medicos programme.

Autor: Thomas RL; Health Economics Research Centre, Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. Electronic address: rhys.thomas@dph.ox.ac.uk., Millett C; Public Health Policy Evaluation Unit, Imperial College London, London, UK; NOVA National School of Public Health, Public Health Research Centre, Comprehensive Health Research Center, CHRC, NOVA University Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal., Sousa Soares R; Department of Health Promotion, Federal University of Paraíba, João Pessoa, PB, Brazil., Hone T; Public Health Policy Evaluation Unit, Imperial College London, London, UK.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Social science & medicine (1982) [Soc Sci Med] 2024 Oct; Vol. 358, pp. 117222. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Aug 17.
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117222
Abstrakt: Worldwide, there are an insufficient number of primary care physicians to provide accessible, high-quality primary care services. Better knowledge on the health impacts of policies aimed at improving access to primary care physicians is important for informing future policies. Using a generalised synthetic control estimator (GSC), we estimate the effect of the increase in primary care physicians from the Programa Mais Médicos in Brazil. The GSC allows us to estimates a continuous treatment effects which are heterogenous by region. We exploit the variation in physicians allocated to each Brazilian microregion to identify the impact of an increasing Mais Médicos primary care physicians. We explore hospitalisations and mortality rates (both total and from ambulatory care sensitive conditions) as outcomes. Our analysis differs from previous work by estimating the impact of the increase in physician numbers, as opposed to the overall impact of programme participation. We examine the impact on hospitalisations and mortality rates and employ a panel dataset with monthly observations of all Brazilian microregion over the period 2008-2017. We find limited effects of an increase in primary care physicians impacting health outcomes - with no significant impact of the Programa Mais Médicos on hospitalisations or mortality rates. Potential explanations include substitution of other health professionals, impacts materialising over the longer-term, and poor within-region allocation of Mais Médicos physicians.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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