Rita Santos
Senior Research Fellow

Profile

Biography

Rita Santos is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Economics of the University of York since 2009. She recently finished her NIHR doctoral research fellowship on 'Measuring and explaining primary care quality variation'. In the past years, she worked on GP gender pay differences, GP practice choice, hospital competition and GP practices competition. Her main interests are developing applications of geographical information system to health economics and spatial econometric methods to health economics and economic theory.

Rita holds a BA in Economics and an MSc in Applied Economics from the Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra. She worked at the Department of Geography, University of Coimbra (2004-2009) where she developed research on environmental impacts on health outcomes.

Research

Overview

• Equity in primary care
• Incentives for quality in primary care
• Geographical distribution of primary care quality
• Impact of competition on GP practice quality
• Impact of competition on Hospital quality
• The application of micro and spatial econometrics to health economics

Research group(s)

• Health and social care policy

Current projects

• National Institute for Health Research doctoral fellowship on “Measuring and explaining variations in general practice performance”.

Teaching

Other teaching

Centre for Health Economics

• Analysing patient data using hospital episode statistics (HES) to evaluate healthcare policy and practice

Distance learning programme

• The Postgraduate Diploma in Health Economics for Health Care Professionals, Module tutor for Module 'The Economics of Health Care Systems' since 2013/14 and Module Leader for 2015/16.