Can patients improve the quality of care they receive? Experimental evidence from Senegal

• Providers in many low and middle-income countries (LMICs) often fail to correctly diagnose and treat their patients, even though they have the clinical knowledge to do so. Against the backdrop of many failed attempts to increase provider effort, this study examines whether quality of care can be improved by encouraging patients to be more active during consultations. We design a simple experiment with undercover standardised patients who randomly vary how much information they disclose about their symptoms. We find that providers are 27% more likely to correctly manage a patient who volunteers several key symptoms of their condition at the start of the consultation, compared to a typical patient who shares less information. Lower performance in the control group is not due to providers' lack of knowledge, an incapacity to ask the right questions, or a response to time or resource constraints. Instead, providers' low motivation seems to limit their ability to adapt their effort to patients' inputs in the consultation. Our findings provide proof-of-concept evidence that interventions making patients more active in their consultations could significantly improve the quality of care in LMICs. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Quality of care

Field experiment

Patient behaviour

Provider

behaviour

Patient-provider interaction

Standardised patients

Communication

Senegal

know-do gap

health-care

income countries

child health

performance

services

doctors

impact

accountability

communication

Development Studies

Business & Economics

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)