This paper investigates the social-welfare efficiency drivers of public university hospitals in Brazil by focusing on how the surrounding social welfare conditions may affect their performance. A novel Genetic Envelopment Analysis (GEA) approach is developed here to this end. Subsequently, LASSO...

Purpose: This study aims at verifying the impact of literacy on over-the-counter (OTC) drug consumer vulnerability as evaluated by health literacy and label comprehension. Design/methodology/approach: The item response theory (IRT) was used to estimate the health literacy of two groups and the...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to estimate the performance of Brazilian hospitals’ services and to examine contextual variables in the socioeconomic, demographic and institutional domains as predictors of the performance levels attained. Design/methodology/approach: The paper applied a...