The growing realisation that the benzodiazepines have potential for causing serious harm has caused concern due to their wide and common use. This has stimulated interest in the costs and benefits of their use. This paper is a review of the adverse effects of benzodiazepines, and concentrates on...

The proposals contained in the White Paper ‘Working for Patients’ have been described as an attempt to introduce competition into a non-competitive situation. Together with the introduction of practice budgets for family practitioners, the granting of self-governing status to NHS hospitals...

More than 90% of the UK workforce drink alcohol and as many as 30% of male employees and 23% of female employees could be consuming quantities above ‘safe limits’. Survey results also indicate that the vast majority of dependent drinkers are in employment, Current evidence suggests that...

Contracting has played a central role in the NHS reforms as the principal mechanism by which resources are transferred from purchasers to providers. The nature, process and role of contracting are traced by examining the development of government policy on this issue since the inception of 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...

The increased pressures on health care budgets have emphasised the need to demonstrate the value for money from health technologies. Most major pharmaceutical companies have therefore commissioned cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness analysis of their products. There is an assumed analogy between...

Following the publication of the Atkinson Review of the measurement of government outputs in the National Accounts, there has been great interest in measuring the productivity growth of the National Health Service. Such macro measures of productivity are important when deciding how much public...

Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are used widely throughout the world to relieve the symptoms of musculoskeletal disorders, in particular osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. These drugs produce significant side effects, including gastro-intestinal ulceration and the associated...

Despite growing interest in the measurement of health-related quality of life, no single means of achieving such measurement has so far emerged as a standard. Researchers from 5 European and Scandinavian countries have jointly developed a common generic measure. The Euroqol questionnaire was...

The cost of training doctors, both in terms of expenditure on medical education and in terms of the induced demand for NHS expenditure created by having more doctors initiating care and cure, are considerable. However, the forecasting of their number and the planning of their utilisation remain...