The resources available for healthcare are limited compared with demand, if not need, and all healthcare systems, regardless of their financing and organisation, employ mechanisms to ration or prioritise finite healthcare resources. This paper reviews alternative approaches that can be used to...

When collecting patient-level resource use data for statistical analysis, for some patients and in some categories of resource use, the required count will not be observed. Although this problem must arise in most reported economic evaluations containing patient-level data, it is rare for...

Objective This paper explores the policy process involved in the production of cost-effectiveness information in the context of both national and local policy-making requirements. We use the decision to implement a new technology for cervical cancer screening (liquid-based cytology) in England...

The payment scale format has been widely used in willingness-to-pay studies in health care. Concerns have been expressed that the format is, in theory, prone to range bias, although this proposition has not been tested directly. We report the findings of a contingent valuation questionnaire...

‘Menorrhagia’, or heavy menstrual bleeding, is a common problem affecting women. The principal driver for treatment is women's experience of its interference in their lives, so a measure of quality of life (QoL) is increasingly used as the primary outcome to assess treatment success. QoL...

An examination of the willingness to pay values elicited from more than 3000 persons involved in three independent studies revealed that the majority had offered one of a limited number of values from the ranges available to them. These values were 'prominent numbers', the use of which has been...

This book provides the reader with a comprehensive set of instructions and examples of how to perform a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of a health intervention. Developed out of a course run by Jordan Louviere at the University of Technology, Sydney, entitled An Introduction to Stated Preference...

The development of an internal market in UK public sector health care has introduced hard budget constraints for those general practitioner purchasers who elect to hold their own budgets or 'funds'. Prescription medicines constitute an element of the fundholder's budget and a theoretical model...

Unlike other industrialised countries, the UK deferred the routine introduction of disease-modifying therapies (DMTs) for multiple sclerosis (MS) in favour of an experiment. Between 2002 and 2005, MS sufferers were identified, were offered DMTs only if deemed suitable by their physicians, and...