CHPSR Seminar | The role of business risk in the sustainability of General Practice partnerships

Verity Watson, University of Aberdeen

Thursday, March 22, 2018
12:00–1:00 pm
Room 201, 2206 East Mall
School of Population and Public Health
University of British Columbia

In the UK, General practices (Primary care physician practices) are traditionally small businesses that are run independently from the National Health Service (NHS). Under the traditional structure, the practice is owned by a single primary care physician – general practitioner (GP) or a partnership of GPs. In both cases, GPs work as medical doctors and as entrepreneurs. This exposes owners to the business risk specific to the practice. GP practices are closing because there are not enough GPs who want to replace the retiring business partners. There are two reasons for this shortage. First, fewer medical students specialise as GPs. Second, fewer GPs want to own a practice and prefer to be employed in an existing practice instead. In this project, we want to examine why the traditional GP business structure seems unattractive to the current generation of GPs.

Dr. Verity Watson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Health Economics Research Unit at the University of Aberdeen, where leads the Methods of Benefit Valuation research theme. Her research focuses on non-market valuation, experimental economics and applied labour economics. Verity has applied stated preference methods to value health, healthcare and environmental amenities. In doing this, she has worked with academics from many different disciplines, the government and the pharmaceutical industry.

You may join remotely via GoToMeeting: https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/297740069. Please let joyce.huang@ubc.ca know if you would like to join this way.