Background: There is a growing recognition of the importance of introducing new ways of working into the UK?s National Health Service (NHS) and other health systems, in order to ensure that patient care is provided as effectively and efficiently as possible. Researchers have examined the...

Direct patient care requires knowledge sharing between clinical professionals. However, clinicians have often been suspicious of managers' motives, this lack of trust often resulting in reluctance to share knowledge for managerial purposes. Trust is one component of the psychological contract -...

Aim: To assess the impact of early intervention (EI) services on service costs for people with first-episode psychosis. Methods: A decision model was constructed to map the care pathways following input from EI services and from standard care. A Markov process was used to run the model over 18...

This paper examines whether or not hospital competition in a market with fixed reimbursement prices can prompt improvements in clinical quality. In January 2006, the British Government introduced a major extension of their market-based reforms to the English National Health Service. From January...

Improving prescription drug quality is an essential health policy goal in modern health systems, though evidence on the available instruments to attain such a goal are scarce. Cost sharing has an arguable role in improving the likelihood of an individual obtaining an appropriate prescription....

This paper examines the arguments for changing the ways that UK drug prices are regulated. In the UK, NHS pharmaceutical expenditures on branded drugs, currently worth about £3 billion a year, have been regulated by the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS) since 1978. We argue that, in...

The aim of this thesis is to help the RM industry avoid misguidedly investing in technologies that are unlikely to be cost-effective and reimbursed by healthcare providers. Health economics provides the tools to demonstrate value for money. These tools are typically used by healthcare providers...