Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 16 June 2021
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 16 June 2021 at 13:15. The seminar will be held via Zoom. Annika Herr (University of Hannover) will be talking about “Incentives not to adopt NHS prescribing guidelines: Dispensing doctors in the NHS”.
Please find below the abstract:
In the English National Health Service (NHS), patients obtain medicines prescribed by their general practitioners (GP) from two types of dispensaries: regular community pharmacies, and GP-owned dispensaries that are co-located on the practice premises. GPs earn profits from in-house dispensing which creates financial incentives that could impede the adoption of cost-efficient prescribing behaviour. In this study, we exploit the introduction of new prescribing guidelines for over-the-counter drugs (OTC) in December 2017 to estimate the causal effect of GP dispensing rights on prescribing behaviour when financial incentives contradict professional consensus. We use monthly prescription data from all GP practices from April 2015 to September 2019 and compare pre- and post-reform OTC prescribing rates in dispensing and non-dispensing GP practices in England with non-affected GP prescribing in Wales (triple difference-in-difference design). Our results show that dispensing GPs modulate their behaviour to retain a financial advantage.