Decisions about how to allocate resources in health care are as much about social value judgements as they are about getting the medical facts right. In this context, it is important to compare the social preferences of members of the general public with those of National Health Service (NHS)...

No Abstract

Current practice in economic evaluation is to assign equal social value to a unit of health improvement ('a QALY is a QALY is a QALY'). Alternative equity positions are typically considered separately from efficiency. One proposal seeks to integrate these two sets of societal concerns by...

This article presents an empirical assessment of the relevance of different factors when understanding preferences for outcome-egalitarian policies in health, in particular respondent age and sex. A representative sample of the Spanish population was interviewed (n = 1209). After being informed...

Introduction: The legal studies literature on procedural justice identifies six key characteristics of procedural justice: accuracy, consistency, impartiality, reversibility, transparency and voice. However, the relative importance of these in the context of public healthcare resource allocation...

Elicitation of utilities from members of the public generally uses verbal description of health states. This paper reports the results of a small-scale time trade-off study on the feasibility of an alternative approach, where health states were simulated using plastic spectacles. This approach...

Is the value of being healthy the same across all ages? The standard practice of economic evaluation assumes so, and does not discriminate between a QALY (Quality Adjusted Life Year) to an elderly person and one to a child. But on the other hand, it is possible to assume that the value of a...