This brief methods paper explains how to use the NSW Government Health Costs of Care Standards to estimate the cost of presentations to emergency departments (ED) in NSW. We begin with a discussion of the allocation of presentations according to visit type, triage category and mode of separation...

The Australian Health Reform Agreement has provided the basis for major change in the delivery of health care services. While the components of reform have undergone extensivenegotiation between Commonwealth and State governments, and have been subject to academic and other commentary, little is...

Limits on health care resources mean that resource allocation decisions should be guided by considerations of costs in relation to benefits. A method of economic evaluation, (cost utility analysis) was used to evaluate the costs and benefits of a physiotherapy outpatients department. The quality...

An evaluation of the Fractured Hip Management Program was conducted, in order to assess its cost effectiveness relative to treatment of these patients without the program. A before-and-after study design was used to identify the impact of the program on the length of hospital stay and outcome,...

Structural and micro-economic reforms have been recommended for hospitals as part of an overall scheme of health care reform. One of the recommended reforms, clinical budgeting, is a health services adaptation of transfer pricing, which is used routinely in commercial enterprises. It involves...

Nursing shortages are commonly observed features of hospital systems in Australia, Europe and the United States. To date there has been very little research on the effects of hospital characteristics on the retention of the nursing staff. In this paper we match individual data on registered...

The topic of this paper is whether it is possible, given the current state of knowledge and technology, to design the appropriate market structure for managed competition. The next section reviews market failure in the private health insurance market. The subsequent two sections describe the...

The Oregon Experiment is an attempt to provide universal access to health care while achieving budgetary caps on expenditure. The appeal of the experiment lies in its explicit approach to rationing health care within a framework of cost effectiveness analysis and its involvement of the community...

While there are many published economic evaluations of health care, few allow the reader to understand the practice of costing health care programmes. The aim of this document is to fill this gap. In the document, the principles of how to cost health care for economic evaluation are outlined....