The aim of this 6-month project was to undertake a scoping study to provide recommendations for identifying NICE’s methodological research priorities and to establish an initial set of such priorities. Specifically the project had three main objectives: (i) To describe current processes by...

The Medical Manpower Standing Advisory Committee made its first report, “Planning the Medical Workforce”, to the Secretary of State in December 1992; recommending that research should be undertaken to quantify the manpower effects of skill mix initiatives. These issues are being raised against a...

Skill mix emerged as a prominent issue in nursing at a time when a new environment, imbued with management values, was forged within the NHS. The issues surrounding skill mix are often highly contentious and, not surprisingly, various interest groups either welcome or reject attempts to examine...

The demand for private health insurance in the UK has risen rapidly in the last decade. The paper discusses the nature of the demand for private health insurance in a health care market dominated by a public supplier, in which the consumer may neither opt out of his contribution to the National...

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...

The paper is first of all an up-to-date of the Central Policy Review Staff report on Alcohol Policies which reviewed the components of an integrated alcohol policy strategy (CPRS, 1979). That report identified sixteen Government departments with some interest in the production, distribution or...

There has been considerable interest in recent years in the major influences on self-perceived health status and health concerns (see Wright, 1985a, for a review). Two factors which might be anticipated to affect these variable are age and sex. The present study aims to examine the influence of...

Diabetes mellitus is a disease with major long-term implications, not only for the health and well-being of affected individuals, but also for costs to the National Health Service. Treatment of the disease and its complications takes up to 4-5% of total health care expenditure in the UK. These...

The development of performance indicators for the NHS has resulted in renewed interest in regression-based measures of hospital performance. This paper considers three regression-based measures of hospital efficiency, including the index of hospital ‘costliness’ proposed by Martin Feldstein...

General medical practice has changed significantly in the past ten years, reflecting a range of innovations giving greater priority to health prevention and promotion and to primary health care generally. One consequence has been a rapid increase in the number of practice nurses. Since 1988 the...