Complements or substitutes? Associations between volumes of care provided in the community and hospitals.

ABSTRACT: Policymakers often suggest that expansion of care in community settings may ease increasing pressures on hospital services. Substitution may lower overall health system costs, but complementarity due to previously unidentified needs might raise them. We used new national data on community and primary medical care services in England to undertake system-level analyses of whether activity in the community acts as a complement or a substitute for activity provided in hospitals. We used two-way fixed effects regression to relate monthly counts of community care and primary medical care contacts to emergency department attendances, outpatient visits and admissions for 242 hospitals between November 2017 and September 2019. We then used national unit costs to estimate the effects of increasing c

SUBMITTER: Lau YS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8526459 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature