Examining the Preferences of Health Care Providers: An application to hospital consultants

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to show how discrete choice experiments (DCEs) can be applied to examine the preferences of health care providers. Health care providers comprise health care organisations and health professionals employed within them. Health professionals make decisions about their supply of labour in addition to clinical decisions. A key policy issue across many developed and developing countries is shortages of health professionals, particularly doctors and nurses. Although a number of policies are being introduced and have been suggested to reduce these shortages, there is little empirical evidence on what factors influence the labour market behaviour of doctors and nurses. Evidence on the relative impact of pay and remuneration on job choices and labour supply has shown that pecuniary factors do matter, but that their effect may be moderate. This raises the issue of what non-pecuniary job characteristics might be altered by policy to increase recruitment and retention. Existing “revealed preference” administrative and survey data do not collect good information on these non-pecuniary job characteristics. DCEs are a method that can be used to inform this issue (Scott, 2001). This chapter focuses on the labour market decisions of hospital consultants in the UK.