@article{0cc028bb1e4a40a7b1c1faabdb460a12,
title = "Patient violence, physicians treatment decisions, and patient welfare: Evidence from China",
abstract = "Although violence in healthcare settings has become a common occurrence worldwide, there is limited evidence on the spillover effects of patient violence on physicians' medical decisions. Utilizing microdata on inpatients from a major public hospital, we investigated how extreme patient violence—the murder of a physician in China—affected physicians' treatment decisions and patient welfare in a hospital geographically distant from the murder site. By matching this patient dataset to physician profiles, we performed a difference-in-differences analysis in which the treatment group comprised patients admitted shortly before and after the murder shock, and the control group consisted of patients admitted during the same months in the previous year. Immediately after the shock, the provision of medical treatment was notably higher, with a 16.9% increase in the number of surgeries and a 9.5% increase in the treatment expenditures. However, patient health outcomes were worse, with an increased mortality rate of 0.9% points. Findings suggest that patient violence dramatically changed physician behavior, causing negative consequences on patients even when the healthcare workers were not direct victims of patient violence.",
keywords = "China, medical service, patient violence",
author = "Xin Zhao and Xiaoxue Li and Benno Torgler and Uwe Dulleck",
note = "Funding Information: The authors would like to thank Editor Gordon Liu, three anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the Queensland University of Technology, Central University of Finance and Economics, Jinan University, and the 6th Biennial Conference of the American Society of Health Economists for comments and suggestions that helped to improve this paper substantially. The study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71704024), Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (Grant No. DP110103653), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in UIBE (CXTD11-01). Funding Information: The authors would like to thank Editor Gordon Liu, three anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the Queensland University of Technology, Central University of Finance and Economics, Jinan University, and the 6th Biennial Conference of the American Society of Health Economists for comments and suggestions that helped to improve this paper substantially. The study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71704024), Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (Grant No. DP110103653), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in UIBE (CXTD11‐01). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.",
year = "2021",
month = apr,
doi = "10.1002/hec.4260",
language = "English",
volume = "30",
pages = "1461--1479",
journal = "Health Economics (United Kingdom)",
issn = "1057-9230",
publisher = "John Wiley & Sons",
number = "6",
}