International mobility provides opportunities for learning and knowledge transfer by health care workers, with significant potential benefits for countries of destination and, in the case of returned migration, countries of origin. This is examined using a typology that recognizes four types of...

Health can be seen as a capital asset, subject to depreciation due both to the passage of time (ageing) and to 'wear and tear'. It is valued for the flow of pain-free time and energy it offers us, and we can increase the quantity and quality of this 'flow' by appropriate care and maintenance,...

It is well known that different methods of eliciting the valuations attached to various health states, such as the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and the Time Trade Off (TTO), yield different results. This study gathers qualitative data from a group of 43 respondents who had previously taken part...

In most modern developed communities, women are known to live longer than men. A less known fact is that in many statistics reporting differences in life expectancy between socio-economic classes, on average women in the worst-off social class live as long as men in the best-off social class, if...

Objectors on ethical grounds to the use of QALYs in priority-setting in public health care systems are here categorised as (1) those who reject all collective priority-setting as unethical; (2) those who accept the need for collective priority-setting but believe that it is contrary to medical...