Background - The geographic distribution of health care funding in Canada has traditionally been based on past allocations and the distribution of health care facilities and providers. Whether this approach has succeeded in distributing resources among populations in keeping with relative health...

Objectives: This article examines the extent of geographic disparity in premature mortality in Ontario and considers factors that may underlie variations in premature mortality across geographic areas. Data Source: Mortality data for years 1992-1996 were obtained from Vital Statistics Records,...

We conducted a literature review of studies on Physician Assistants working in a variety of settings and found few evaluation studies on the costs and/or effectiveness of Physician Assistants in primary care practices, Emergency Departments and in hospital settings other than Emergency...

This document reviews the findings of studies of the clinical and economic performance of Ontario’s Health Service Organizations and makes recommendations for further evaluation. The tentative conclusions regarding HSO performance indicate that: 1. The HSO program in total and some HSOs...

In this study we develop, appraise and compare alternative approaches to addressing the problem of determining the quantity and mix of nursing resources required for the health- care system in Ontario in the future. We argue that there is no ‘right’ number of nurses per se. On the contrary,...

Systematic variations in health and illness among social groups have persisted and, in some cases increased, in many countries in spite of improvements in the availability of, and access to, health care services. Health policy makers have responded by showing increasing interest in non-clinical...

• The production of health, illness and recovery in populations is a complex process that embodies a wide range of influences and interactions between influences • Economic evaluation approaches oversimplify the decision-makers' problem by adopting inappropriate research paradigm that...

Recent publications have acknowledged the theoretical superiority of the healthy years equivalent (HYE) concept over quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), but have raised questions about the practicality of measuring them. We describe a simple, two-stage, lottery-based approach to measure HYEs...

Effective management and productive use of health care expenditures in Canada requires that primary care doctors in Canada be paid by means of a system which more closely reflects the goal of improving the health of the population and that means replacing the current fee-for-service system. This...

Study Objectives - (i) To develop a non-mortality based proxy for relative needs for health care among regional populations. (ii) To compare this proxy with a mortality-based proxy for population relative needs. (iii) To evaluate the additional value of a proxy based on a combination of...