In recent years civil society organisations, associations, institutions and groups have become increasingly involved at various levels in the governance of healthcare systems around the world. In the UK, particularly in the context of recent reform of the National Health Service in England,...

Resources available to the health care sector are finite and typically insufficient to fulfil all the demands for health care in the population. Decisions must be made about which treatments to provide. Relatively little is known about the views of the general public regarding the principles...

The paper reports from a study that asked 150 interviewees their willingness to pay (WTP) in increased earmarked taxation for three different health care programmes: a helicopter ambulance service, more heart operations and more hip replacements. Reasons behind the stated WTP were asked for....

As resources in health care are scarce, health authorities and other health organizations are charged with determining how best to spend limited resources. While a number of formal approaches to priority setting within health authorities have been used internationally, there has been limited...

This paper is concerned with the concept of process utility in health care. The paper begins by outlining the reasons why it might be important to include process utility in health care evaluation. Problems in defining process and outcome are then outlined, after which the discussion turns to...

The case against the use of willingness to pay (WTP) methods to value the benefits of publicly-provided health care is often made on the basis that WTP is associated with ability to pay. In this paper, it is demonstrated that this argument is not so straightforward, depending on two criteria:...

The notion that consumerist behaviour is, or should be, prevalent amongst individuals seeking health care has underlain recent United States and British governmental policy directives. Consumer groups make similar assumptions when exhorting individuals to treat health care like any other...

Despite the acceptance that health gain is the most important attribute of health care, other aspects of health care may affect utility. The aim of this paper is to report an experiment to test the impact of providing different levels of information in the context of the EuroWill study, a joint...

Due to resource scarcity, every health system worldwide must decide what services to fund, and conversely, what services not to fund. In order to institute and refine a macro-level priority setting framework within a large, urban health authority in Alberta, Canada, researchers and decision...

The application of Sen's notion of capabilities to problems of the allocation of resources to health in the form of an extra-welfarist framework underlies the justification of quality adjusted life years (QALYs) as the method for valuing the benefits of health care. In this paper we critically...