Rita Santos
Senior Research Fellow

Profile

Biography

Rita Santos is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Economics (CHE), University of York. Her research examines how the organisation and geography of health systems influence access, quality, and equity of care. She specialises in causal inference and systems approaches, using real-world data to investigate how place-based factors, provider behaviour, and institutional design shape population health outcomes. Her work combines spatial and network methods to model interdependencies between healthcare providers and to identify the mechanisms driving variation in performance across local health systems.

Rita is a Co-Investigator on several major NIHR and UKRI programmes, including the ELEVATE, a mixed-methods NIHR HS&DR study identifying innovative models of urgent and emergency care in rural and coastal areas of England, ESHCRU, Economics of Health Systems and Interface with Social Care Policy Research Unit, Healthy Urban Places (MRC), and Health Determinants Research Collaborations (HDRCs). Her research further includes the evaluation of environmental policies such as Clean Air Zones and the analysis of workforce dynamics and system pressures across primary and emergency care.

Her work integrates rigorous econometric analysis with sustained engagement with policymakers, clinicians, and local authorities to ensure that findings are translated into policy and practice. Rita disseminates her research widely through peer-reviewed publications, invited lectures, and national and international conferences. She also leads training and capacity-building initiatives promoting the use of quantitative methods to address contemporary challenges in health systems research.

She has published extensively in leading international journals, including The Economic Journal, Health Economics, Social Science & Medicine, and Regional Science and Urban Economics. Her current research develops spatial and network models to understand how health systems respond to pressures such as workforce shortages, service reconfiguration, and inequalities in access, with the overarching aim of supporting the design of more equitable and resilient healthcare systems.

Research

Overview

Rita’s research examines the organisation and financing of health systems, with a particular focus on how different policy and funding arrangements shape access, quality, and efficiency of care. Her work brings together empirical analysis and policy insight to address key challenges in the design and delivery of healthcare.

Her research encompasses several interrelated areas:

• Emergency and urgent care economics, including the evaluation of innovative service models and workforce configurations aimed at improving access and outcomes in rural and coastal settings.
• Funding and contracting in primary care, exploring how payment mechanisms, provider networks, and incentive structures influence service quality, efficiency, and equity.
• Spatial and network analysis of healthcare systems, investigating how geography, inter-provider relationships, and local system characteristics contribute to variation in performance.
• Health, environment, and inequalities, assessing the role of environmental and socioeconomic factors in driving disparities in healthcare utilisation and population health.
• Methodological development, applying spatial econometrics, causal inference, and real-world data to strengthen evidence for health policy and system reform.

Rita’s work aims to generate robust, policy-relevant evidence that supports the development of more equitable, sustainable, and resilient health systems, both in the UK and internationally.

Projects

Rita's projects can be found here.

Research group(s)

• Lead of methods
• Health and social care policy

Teaching

Postgraduate

Rita contributes extensively to postgraduate and professional training in health economics and applied econometrics. At the University of York, she coordinates the Centre for Health Economics’ course Analysing Patient-Level Data using Hospital Episode Statistics (HES).

Rita also contributes regularly to international postgraduate programmes and summer schools in Health Policy and Spatial Health Econometrics. Namely, she has developed and delivered short courses on spatial and causal methods for health system evaluation, reflecting her commitment to building research capacity and promoting the use of rigorous quantitative evidence in policy analysis.

Her teaching on the application of advanced econometric and spatial methods to real-world policy questions fosters a critical understanding of how data can inform decision-making across health systems. She supervises MSc and PhD students working on topics such as healthcare quality, inequalities, and spatial modelling, supporting the next generation of applied health economists.

External activities

Overview

Rita maintains an active profile in the wider academic and policy community. She contributes her expertise to several national and international research funding bodies, acting as a reviewer and panel member for the NIHR, UKRI–MRC, the Health Foundation, and the National Science Centre (Poland). Rita is also frequently invited to assess research proposals and fellowship applications that involve the application of advanced econometric and spatial methods to real-world policy questions, fostering a critical understanding of how data can inform decision-making across health systems.

Rita is regularly invited to present her work at academic and policy forums, including keynote and plenary lectures at the APHEC Conference, the Spatial Health Econometrics Workshop, and the Spanish Health Economics Association. She has organised and co-led a number of international training events and workshops, such as the Spatial Health Econometrics Summer School and the Rome Health Economics Workshop, which promote the use of advanced analytical methods to address health system challenges. She also served as Guest Editor for the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, and REGION.

She is a member of the doctoral boards in Health and Longevity at the University of Bergamo and in Public Health, Epidemiology, Statistics and Economics at the University of Milan Bicocca, where she contributes to doctoral training and supervision. Through these roles, she supports the development of research capacity and the application of robust economic evidence to inform health policy and system reform.

Invited talks and conferences

Search "Santos" under CHE Talks and Presentations.