French GPs’ willingness to delegate tasks: when risk aversion meets financial incentives
Abstract
Within hospital settings, delegation to paramedics is fairly recent in France. Whether General Practitioners are likely to follow hospital consultants is unknown. A 2012 survey of 2,000 GPs might help foresee GPs willingness to do so. This paper tests whether a more favourable funding system might help increasing GPs willingness. We implement a quasi-experimental design wherein GP’s are randomly selected to form three groups of equal size, each of them being exposed to a different funding scheme when declaring their willingness to delegate tasks to nurses: fully funded (FF) by the social security administration, self-funded by GPs’ revenues (Self Funded, SF) and half-funded by both the social security administration and GPs (Half Funded, HF). GP’s likelihood to be in favour of task delegation is estimated with a Probit model which especially considers GP’s attitude toward risk (aversion or preference), among a set of covariates such as age, gender, rural/urban area, GP’s density and funding scheme. This article shows that, firstly GPs are more likely to favour delegation where they share a lower proportion of the cost. Secondly, the effect of risk aversion on the likelihood of being in favour of delegation is not altered by the funding scheme.