This paper consists of a review of economic evaluations of mental health care. The conclusion which emerges from this review is that the existing literature is lacking in both quantity and quality. Only seven evaluations of both the costs and effects of alternative forms of mental health care...

The main purpose of this paper is to measure the costs of small (i.e. less than 50 beds) NHS units for the care of mentally handicapped persons in the community and to compare these costs with those of hospital care standardising wherever possible for resident characteristics such as age and...

This paper summarises the cost-effectiveness work which has been carried out on alternative patterns of care for elderly people, people with a mental handicap and people with chronic mental illness. The amount of work completed varies according to the client group concerned. There is, for...

The expansion of community residential facilities for people with a mental handicap requires a significant amount of investment of society’s scarce resources. If the resources are to be used efficiently it is essential that an evaluation of the relative costs and effects of alternative methods...

It is imperative that health care resources are spent as efficiently as possible by committing them to demonstrably cost-effective treatments and procedures. The NHS reforms of 1989 aimed to help achieve this by separating out the roles of purchaser and provider. In doing so, ‘trade’ between...

In this paper there is an attempt to demonstrate the relevance of economics to the provision of mental health care and to describe how one technique in the economist’s toolkit should be applied in this field if the objective of policy is to use society’s scarce resources efficiently. The...

This paper is concerned with the costing of informal care which is the unpaid help provided, in this instance, to an elderly person by relatives and friends. Economic appraisals of alternative ways of caring for elderly people have frequently been unable to cost this input although it has often...

The number of children resident in large mental handicap hospitals has fallen substantially in recent years but those that remain tend to be amongst the most profoundly handicapped. If the benefits of community care are to be extended to this group of children then new residential facilities...

This paper analyzes the total cost of individual wards in the Royal Albert Hospital, Lancaster during the financial year 1981/2. The hospital concerned provides care for over 800 mentally handicapped residents and the average cost per patient per day is within the national average for such...

The economic theory of principal and agent is examined to assess its suitability for application to the world of social care. Principal and agent theory hinges on the bases of two individuals, the principal, who is ill-informed and the agent, who is informed. The principal hires the agent to act...