Economics Research Seminar – Professor Giuseppe Moscelli
Title: Do changes in management practices reduce hospital waiting times? Theory and evidence from a workforce retention programme
Date: Wednesday 14 October 2026
Time: 13:30 to 14:30
Venue: Online
If you would like to attend, please register using the following link
Speaker: Professor Giuseppe Moscelli
https://sites.google.com/view/giuseppe-moscelli/home
Abstract:
Long before the pandemic, increasingly longer waiting times for hospital treatment in the English NHS have 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.