Aims-We describe differences in in-hospital mortality between Scotland and England and test whether these differences are robust to controlling for the case-mix of patients. In spite of Scotland and England having much in common in regard to their hospital systems and populations we observe...

Hospital bed blocking occurs when hospital patients are ready to be discharged to a nursing home but no place is available, so that hospital care acts as a more costly substitute for long-term care. We investigate the extent to which higher supply of nursing home beds or lower prices can reduce...

Expenditure on long term care is expected to rise, driven by an ageing population. Coordination between health and long term care is increasingly a priority for policymakers. Elderly individuals living at home who suffer trauma, such as hip fracture or stroke, generally require immediate acute...

Objectives: We investigate variations in costs and length of stay (LoS) among hospitals for ten clinical treatments to assess: 1. The extent to which resource use is driven by the characteristics of patients and of the type and quality of care they receive; 2. After taking these characteristics...

Hospital bed‐blocking occurs when hospital patients are ready to be discharged to a nursing home, but no place is available, so that hospital care acts as a more costly substitute for long‐term care. We investigate the extent to which greater supply of nursing home beds or lower prices can...

Productivity is one of the key measures against which NHS achievements can be judged and is the focus of this report. We update our previous analyses of NHS productivity growth since 2004/05, focussing on the change in NHS productivity between 2011/12 and 2012/13, the latter financial year being...

National income accounting practice is to weight health service activities by their cost so that they can be aggregated into an output index. Quality changes are ignored. We propose an 'ideal' value weighted output index in which the value attached to each output reflects its contribution to...