Implementing the findings of research to change the behaviour of health care professionals has become an increasingly prominent issue. However, designing valid studies to evaluate different methods of achieving changes requires considerable care and there are a number of pitfalls evident from...

Although economic evaluation in health care has a long-standing tradition in the United Kingdom, very little is known about its impact on decision making, particularly following the introduction of the internal market. Since managed competition appears to be growing in popularity worldwide, the...

Meta-analysis provides a family of statistical techniques for combining the results of similar studies. This paper examines the meta-analysis of clinical data in economic studies, and points to the issues and considerations that must be addressed when designing and conducting a meta-analysis of...

There is increasing professional and policy interest in the role of clinical guidelines for promoting effective and efficient health care. The NHS Health Technology Assessment Programme identified an urgent need, when such guidelines are produced, to develop a framework and methods for...

Distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA) is a framework for incorporating health inequality concerns into the economic evaluation of health sector interventions. In this tutorial we describe the technical details of how to conduct DCEA, using an illustrative example comparing...

This handbook is intended to inform policy makers at various levels of decision making in health care about the technique of economic appraisal and to help them appreciate the potential roles of economic appraisal in health policy. In this context “policy makers” may be broadly defined:...

The Department of Health has recently published a register of economic evaluations of health care treatments and programmes. The objective of the register is to assist health care decision makers in assessing the value for money from alternative ways of allocation scarce resources. If the...