The Role of Nurses in Hospital Productivity

Curbing health care spending while improving quality of care is one of the major challenges facing public policies in Chile. A key input in this debate is understanding the processes by which resources are utilized in the production of health care. The goal of this project is to strengthen cross-disciplinary research between economics and nursing, to understand the key role that nurses play in the production of efficient and high-quality health care. The World Health Organization has made several recommendations to expand the role of nurses, and many countries are expanding nurses’ scope of practice. Atal aims to understand the key role that nurses play in the productivity of the health care sector by bringing together disciplinary know-how and research with state-of-the-art empirical methods in health economics. The project will entail the estimation of hospital production functions –the relationship between inputs and outputs of hospitals—with a particular focus on the role of nurses.