We sought to compare the performance of the EQ-5D and SF-6D with regard to the criteria of practicality, convergent validity, and construct validity, the level of agreement between the two measures was also assessed. Responses from 1865 individuals aged 45 years in one general practice were...

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General practitioners (GPs) exert a major impact on NHS resource use, both as providers of primary care and as referrers to secondary care. Referral rates are subject to wide variations, leading to the conjecture that certain GPs may have different 'referral thresholds' from those of others. In...

Fundholding general practices have been observed to be more successful than non-fundholders in controlling the growth of their prescribing costs. Debate persists over the likely duration of this fundholding effect. Regression analysis of changes in prescribing costs for a large sample of...

The payment scale format has been widely used in willingness-to-pay studies in health care. Concerns have been expressed that the format is, in theory, prone to range bias, although this proposition has not been tested directly. We report the findings of a contingent valuation questionnaire...

This paper describes an experiment to test the construct validity of contingent valuation, by eliciting women's valuations for the NHS cervical cancer screening programme. It is known that, owing to low levels of knowledge of cancer and screening in the general population, women both...

Recently published evidence from two large-scale clinical trials conducted in England and in Denmark suggests that faecal occult blood screening for colorectal cancer significantly reduces mortality. However, before screening can be advocated as part of national health policy, its...

An examination of the willingness to pay values elicited from more than 3000 persons involved in three independent studies revealed that the majority had offered one of a limited number of values from the ranges available to them. These values were 'prominent numbers', the use of which has been...

In a recent issue of Health Economics Letters, Whynes et al. report an observation not previously reported in the willingness-to-pay (WTP) literature; that when people are asked to provide an estimate using payment scales they tend to disproportionately select prominent values (that is, 1, 2, 5,...