Eduardo Costa provides a link to his working paper called "License to kill? The impact of hospital strikes", which, as the title suggests talks about the relation between strikes of physicians, nurses and diagnostic and therapeutic technicians and deaths in hospitals of the Portuguese NHS.

Read the paper here

Abstract

Hospital strikes in the Portuguese National Health Service (NHS) are becoming increasingly frequent, raising concerns in what respects patient safety. In fact, data shows that hospital mortality for patients admitted during strikes increases by 10%. This paper analyses the effects of different types of hospital strikes (Physicians, Nurses and Diagnostic and Therapeutic Technicians - DTT) on patients' outcomes and hospital activity.

We use patient-level data comprising all NHS hospital admissions in mainland Portugal from 2012 to 2016, together with a comprehensive strike dataset comprising over 130 strikes. Preliminary results, controlling for hospital characteristics and changes in patients' composition, suggest an 8% increase in hospital mortality for patients exposed to physicians' strikes. No significant effect is found for nurses or DTTs' strikes. Additionally, hospital operations are partially disrupted during strikes, with a sharp reduction in surgical admissions (up to 60%) and a substitution from inpatient to outpatient care admissions. Moreover, strikes are associated with increase complications during births, and with less cesarean sections. The impact of strikes depends on the type of hospital and on patient admission characteristics. Results suggest that legal minimum staffing levels defi ned during strikes fail to prevent worse health outcomes for both new and existing patients.