Elective care waiting times predict patient satisfaction – but not private pay growth
Waiting times for hip replacements appear to have a significant impact on patient satisfaction, but don’t reliably predict growth in private pay.
Using OECD data on waiting times for hip replacements, health care expenditure and the level of satisfaction with the health care system of various countries, we ran regressions to look at whether waiting times can be used to predict which countries might experience significant growth in private pay.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a statistically significant correlation between the average number of days patients had to wait for a hip replacement in 2019 and the level of satisfaction with the health care system of respective countries the following year. The former accounted for about 35% of the variance in the latter.
Last year we found evidence that dissatisfaction with a country’s health care system leads to increasing private expenditure on health care in that country. So you might expect that waiting times would predict private pay growth.
However, we found no evidence for this. Regressing the average number of days for a hip replacement in 2019 against growth in private pay between 2019 and 2022, we found that the former accounted for less than 5% of the variance in the latter; the correlation between the two was incredibly weak and nowhere near statistically significant.
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