Background: Recent studies have suggested that walking interventions may be effective (at least in the short term) at increasing physical activity amongst those people who are the most inactive. This is a leading objective of contemporary public health policy in the UK and worldwide. However,...

Background Investing in computer-based information systems is notoriously risky, since many systems fail to become routinely used as part of everyday working practices, yet there is clear evidence about the management practices which improve the acceptance and integration of such systems. Our...

The aim of this paper is to discuss the use of Bayesian methods in cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) and the common ground between Bayesian and traditional frequentist approaches. A further aim is to explore the use of the net benefit statistic and its advantages over the incremental...

While the development of modem medicine is associated with both increases in scientific knowledge and. improved outcomes in health care it is also associated with increased uncertainty as expert and lay knowledge bases have diverged and separated. The development of a principal-agent...

The principal object of the study, set out in Dr. Dejardin's model report of 1st February 1979. is to quantify the factors influEmcing the annual growth in public expenditure between 1970 and 1976 on the following services: general medical care. specialist medical care (excluding in-patient...

BackgroundThe reasoning behind evaluating medical interventions is that a hierarchy of methods exists which successively produce improved and therefore more rigorous evidence based medicine upon which to make clinical decisions. At the foundation of this hierarchy are case studies, retrospective...

Is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies? We propose and analyze a particular market failure that leads to inefficiently low fertility in equilibrium. The friction is caused by the lack of ownership of children: if parents have no claim on their children’s income, the private...

Several studies have shown that at the individual level there exists a negative relationship between age at first birth and completed fertility. Using twin data in order to control for unobserved heterogeneity as possible source of bias, Kohler et al. (2001) showed the significant presence of...

This paper addresses a key issue in the health OR literature, namely the apparent failure of OR modelling to become embedded and widely implemented within healthcare organizations. The research presented here is a case study to evaluate the adoption of one particular simulation modelling tool,...

The Republic of Moldova demonstrates the highest reliance on natural contraceptive methods in Europe, and natural methods account for an increasing proportion of contraceptive mix since 1997. This study investigates method use correlates in Moldova in order to explain this high reliance on...