title: Does hospital ownership affect patient experience? An investigation into public-private sector differences in England.
abstract: Using patient experience survey data, the paper investigates whether hospital ownership affects the level of quality reported by patients whose care is funded by the National Health Service in areas other than clinical quality. We estimate a switching regression model that accounts for (i) some observable characteristics of the patient and the hospital episode; (ii) selection into private hospitals; and (iii) unmeasured hospital characteristics captured by hospital fixed effects. We find that the experience reported by patients in public and private hospitals is different, i.e. most dimensions of quality are delivered differently by the two types of hospitals, with each sector offering greater quality in certain specialties or to certain groups of patients. However, the sum of all ownership effects is not statistically different from zero at sample means. In other words, hospital ownership in and of itself does not affect the level of quality of the average patient's reported experience. Differences in mean reported quality levels between the private and public sectors are entirely attributable to patient characteristics, the selection of patients into public or private hospitals and unobserved characteristics specific to individual hospitals, rather than to hospital ownership.
authors.affiliation: Leeds University Business School, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. v.perotin@lubs.leeds.ac.uk
authors.forename: Virginie
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Pérotin
authors.forename: Bernarda
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Zamora
authors.forename: Rachel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Reeves
authors.forename: Will
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Bartlett
authors.forename: Pauline
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Allen
mesh_terms: D036262:Empirical Research; D004739:England; D016304:Hospitals, Private / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006779:Hospitals, Public / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D010067:Ownership / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D017060:Patient Satisfaction / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D017149:Private Sector; D017150:Public Sector; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D013222:State Medicine