Vortragssitzung
Labour and Education
Vorträge
Deciding to Leave: The Brexit, EU Nurse Withdrawal, and Health Care Quality
Kai Fischer, DICE, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
Einleitung / Introduction
Abstract: Most Western healthcare systems rely on foreign medical staff to handle the everrising demand for health workers. We analyze the contribution of foreign health workers to the performance of a country’s public health system. We exploit the decline of EU nurses in England’s National Health Service (NHS) after the Brexit referendum. We find hospital providers with a higher share of EU nurses before the referendum to on average face more hospital-related deaths, to conduct fewer diagnostic tests and to host less intensive care patients. Readmissions of patients within 30 days after discharge become more likely. As mechanisms, we identify a changing composition of the workforce instead of an actual deficit in the labor force. We argue that the found effects are driven by a deterioration in health care quality instead of capacity constraints.
Methode / Method
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Ergebnisse / Results
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Zusammenfassung / Conclusion
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AutorInnen
Kai Fischer, DICE, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
The effect of education on chronic illness
Christoph Kronenberg, CINCH, University Duisburg-Essen
Einleitung / Introduction
The global disease burden is shifting from communicable to non-communicable diseases. Deaths from non-communicable diseases are delayable and reducing them is part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, little is known about whether increasing education reduces the probability of having non-communicable diseases. We address this gap by exploiting exogenous variation in schooling caused by changes in school-leaving age policies in six European countries and Australia. We find that the results vary by disease and country. Increased education reduces the probability of having cataracts by about 3% or around 10% for circulatory conditions in all countries we analyze. In contrast, for other conditions, such as cancer, a reduction is observed in some countries but not in others, and for some conditions, such as ulcers, fractures and mental illness, the results are economically meaningless and statistically insignificant.