The aim of cost effectiveness analysis (CEA) is to inform the allocation of scarce resources. CEA is routinely used in assessing the cost-effectiveness of specific health technologies by agencies such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in England and Wales. But...

Over the last decade the British Labour Government has presided over unprecedented increases in levels of spending on the National Health Service (NHS). But Opposition parties now claim that this record growth in NHS expenditure has been misspent, and some commentators are already predicting...

This article considers how the 'accidental logics' of political settlements for the English National Health Service (NHS) and the Medicare and Medicaid programmes in the United States have resulted in different institutional arrangements and different implicit social contracts for rationing,...

Gwyn Bevan and Matthew Skellern review evidence on the effects of hospital competition on quality of care within the English NHS and question whether they support government proposals to extend competition.

Objective:- To compare the performance of two new approaches to risk adjustment that are free of the influence of observational intensity with methods that depend on diagnoses listed in administrative databases. Setting:- Administrative data from the US Medicare program for services provided in...

Since devolution in 1998, it has become more difficult to collect comparable data across the four UK countries, particularly on NHS expenditure and waiting times. - NHS activity and health outcomes seem more dependent on how healthcare resources are deployed than higher levels of resources. -...

Many revenue management problems have a network aspect. In this paper, we argue that a network can be thought of as a system of substitutable and complementary products, and the value of a revenue management model should be supermodular or submodular in the availability of two resources as the...

Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is well equipped to deal with conflicting, qualitative objectives when evaluating strategic options. Scenario planning provides a framework for confronting uncertainty, which MCDA lacks. Integration of these methods offers various advantages, yet its...

In this paper we compare two high-profile strategic policy reviews undertaken for the UK government on environmental risks: radioactive waste management and climate change. These reviews took very different forms, both in terms of analytic approach and deliberation strategy. The Stern Review on...