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Do changes in management practices reduce hospital waiting times? Evidence from a workforce retention programme
Long before the pandemic, increasingly longer waiting times for hospital treatment in English NHS has been a challenge, directly affecting patient outcomes, service efficiency, and overall healthcare quality. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model that links patients’ waiting times for planned treatment to hospital nurses’ retention, and postulate the possibility of a virtuous loop between these two variables that can be ignited by higher managerial quality. We test these hypotheses by assessing the effects of a national workforce policy on waiting times, leveraging a synthetic difference-in-difference analysis using detailed patient records for planned care admissions to English NHS hospitals.
In line with the predictions, our results suggest that the policy had indeed improved nurses’ retention, while also leading to reductions in average waiting times for planned knee replacement surgery and shortens waiting times for all planned procedures. Our results highlight the potential benefits of workforce stability and managerial improvements on healthcare delivery.
Speaker:
Giuseppe is a Professor of Economics at the University of Surrey and an empirical economist specialising in health economics, labour economics, and applied micro-econometrics. He previously held research positions at the Centre for Health Economics, University of York, and before his PhD he has worked in investment banking at Lehman Brothers in London. Giuseppe earned his PhD in Econometrics and Empirical Economics from the University of Rome Tor Vergata, following undergraduate and master’s degrees from Bocconi University in Milan.
His research focuses on generating robust causal evidence to inform health and workforce policy, with particular expertise in provider choice and competition, hospital performance, waiting times, health inequalities in access to healthcare, and the economics of the healthcare workforce. From 2019 to 2025, Giuseppe has been the Principal Investigator of a major Health Foundation–funded programme examining the determinants and impacts of hospital workforce retention in the English NHS. His work is widely published in leading health economics and social science journals.