Provider, improve thyself
In the developing world, a large portion of health care providers have no formal medical training. Now a new study of rural India, co-authored by an MIT professor, shows that modest levels of medical training can improve the quality of health care furnished by those informal providers. More specifically, the study, in the form of a novel field experiment conducted in the state of West Bengal, India, shows that informal care providers are more likely to handle cases correctly and compile basic checklists of patient information after undergoing about 150 hours of training over a period of months. “They do seem to be learning, and they are using this knowledge,” says Abhijit Banerjee, the Ford International Professor of Economics at MIT and a co-author of the study. The experiment analyzed whether unlicensed health care providers could act adequately when faced with information pertaining to three types of illness — chest pain, breathing problems,...