This paper reviews the existing literature on the demand for dental care and assesses its implications for the U.K., where such analysis has been lacking to date. The characteristics of the U.K. dental system are briefly outlined, and some observations on the theory of the demand for dental care...

Objectives The UK's National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has an explicit cost-effectiveness threshold for deciding whether or not services are to be provided in the National Health Service (NHS), but there is currently little evidence to support the level at which it is...

Accounting for variation in the quality of care is a major challenge for the assessment of hospital cost performance. Because data on patients’ health improvement are generally not available, existing studies have resorted to inherently incomplete outcome measures such as mortality or...

Data Envelopment Analysis is a potentially useful technique for measuring production efficiency and is being increasingly applied to health care services, as with other areas. However, some fundamental concerns need to be addressed before Data Envelopment Analysis can be accepted widely as a...