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Growing rates of antibiotic resistance, caused by increasing antibiotic use, pose a threat by making antibiotics less effective in treating infections.

We aimed to study whether physicians working at privately and publicly owned health centres differed in the likelihood of prescribing antibiotics and choosing broad-spectrum over narrow-spectrum antibiotics.

To estimate the effect of ownership on the probability of a prescribed drug being an antibiotic, we analysed all 4.5 million prescriptions issued from 2011 to 2015 at primary health centres in Västerbotten, Sweden. We controlled for patient age, sex, number of prescriptions per patient, and month of prescription, and used a maximum likelihood logit estimator. We then analysed how ownership affected the likelihood of a prescribed antibiotic …