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Health Policy and Planning Advance Access originally published online on January 16, 2006
Health Policy and Planning 2006 21(2):91-100; doi:10.1093/heapol/czj015
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press in association with The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. All rights reserved.

Original article

The impact of hospital management reforms on absenteeism in Costa Rica

Ariadna García-Prado1,2 and Mukesh Chawla2

1 Economics Department, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Spain and 2 The World Bank, Washington DC, USA

Correspondence: Ariadna García Prado, Department of Economics, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Campus de Arrosadia, 31006 Pamplona, Spain. Tel: +34 948169845; E-mail: ariadna{at}unavarra.es, agarciaprado{at}worldbank.org.

The reduction of high levels of absenteeism among health care workers was one the objectives of the reforms undertaken to improve public hospital performance during the 1990s in Costa Rica. This paper attempts to assess the impact of changes in reimbursement methods and organizational reform on absence rates among health care personnel in Costa Rican public hospitals for the period 1995–2001. Our results show the reforms to have had a negative impact on absenteeism, which increased throughout the considered period. Results further indicate that the policy of not substituting absentee workers, which was introduced through the reforms, did not work as expected in a permissive environment in which peer pressure mechanisms were lacking. In addition, the explicit incentives for workers included in the reforms were retained and used at facility level. There is a pressing need in the future for control and disciplinary mechanisms for health care personnel and for the introduction of absence rates as an explicit goal to be monitored and evaluated.

Key Words: absenteeism, hospital management reforms, sick-leave policy, Costa Rica

1These figures represent the percentage of medical personnel at primary care clinics who were absent. They include authorized leave and unjustifiable or unexplained absences.


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