Posted on Saturday, 3rd April 2010 by Emily Smith
By Jacob Goldstein
Hospital death rates increase by about one fifth when nurses go on strike, according to a working paper the NBER published today.
Another way of parsing the numbers: There is one additional death for every 286 patients admitted to the hospital during a strike.
Sure, it’s a somewhat intuitive finding. But it’s still interesting to see the numbers and get a sense of the magnitude.
“Lots of people know that strikes are bad, but I don’t know that anybody’s put a number on the human suffering that occurs as a result,” Jonathan Gruber, one of the authors of the paper, told me when I called him this afternoon.
Gruber’s an MIT economist who has worked with the Obama administration. I asked him about the policy implications of his paper, but he didn’t want to make too much of the findings. “What economics is very good at is precise answers to small questions,” he said.
The finding is based on data from New York state between 1983 and 2004. It includes 50 strikes at 43 hospitals. Gruber and his co-author, Samuel Kleiner, looked at the rate of in-hospital mortality within 10 days of admission.
They also considered the possibility that patients who were admitted to the hospital during a nurses’ strike would be sicker, on average, than patients who were admitted when there wasn’t a strike. But they found that the mix of patients didn’t change significantly during strikes.
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Tags: Death Rate, Rate
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