This paper presents evidence on the extent to which the finance and the delivery of health care in Britain are equitable. The analysis of health care delivery focuses on whether there is ‘equal treatment for equal need’ irrespective of income. Examination of data from the 1985 General...

Study Objectives: This paper explores the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and health-related quality of life (HRQoL), measured using EQ-5D, for men and women within a national population sample.Methods: Data were taken from the 1996 Health Survey for England, an annual survey...

English programme budgeting data have yielded major new insights into the link between health care spending and health outcomes. This paper updates two recent studies that have used programme budgeting data for 295 Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) in England to examine the link between spending and...

The NHS Plan, published in July 2000, presented an ambitious blueprint for the transformation of the way the NHS delivers health care. The backdrop to the Plan is the substantial increase in resources for the NHS promised for the next 5 years. At the heart of the Plan is the aim of ensuring...

The 1997 White Paper, The New NHS, announced that Trusts would be required to publish and benchmark the costs of the treatments they provide on a similar basis. Between November 1998 and March 1999 five different indices were produced purporting to measure the unit costs of service provision in...

This document reports the results of a study commissioned by the NHS Executive to examine the determinants of the NHS practice level prescribing expenditures. The purpose was to develop a needs based capitation formula for allocating annually approximately £4.5 billion of NHS revenues to Health...

There is increased emphasis on the measurement of performance in the NHS. Following the White Paper, additional high level indicators for measuring primary care performance at Health Authority level have been proposed by the NHS Executive. These include measures based on prescribing and on...

The need for priority setting in health care systems has forced us to think more carefully about objectives and opportunity costs. If our objective is the maximisation of the health of the community, for this to be an effective guide to action we have to find some practical way of describing and...

The question of what rules should be used in determining access to health and health care has been hardly addressed in the public debate on the future of the health service. In the UK, as in other countries, the goal of efficiency (production of output using least cost-methods) has dominated...

Decision making in health care involves two sets of related decisions: those concerning appropriate service provision on the basis of existing information; and those concerned with whether to fund additional research to reduce the uncertainty relating to the decision. Information acquisition is...