Waiting times are commonly used in the health sector to ration demand. We show that when money charges (coinsurance rates) are optimally set and there are no redistributional considerations, it is never optimal to have a positive waiting time if the marginal cost of waiting is higher for...

Hospital bed‐blocking occurs when hospital patients are ready to be discharged to a nursing home, but no place is available, so that hospital care acts as a more costly substitute for long‐term care. We investigate the extent to which greater supply of nursing home beds or lower prices can...

In many public healthcare systems treatments are rationed by waiting time. We examine the optimal allocation of a fixed supply of a given treatment between different groups of patients. Even in the absence of any distributional aims, welfare is increased by third degree waiting time...

Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are now routinely collected in the English National Health Service (NHS) and used to compare and reward hospital performance within a high-powered pay-for-performance scheme. However, PROMs are prone to missing data. For example, hospitals often fail to...

A study by health economists at the University of York has, for the first time, produced an estimate of the impact on other NHS patients of new and more costly drugs and other treatments. This research suggests a refinement of the way the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence...

Healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries face considerable population healthcare needs with markedly fewer resources than those in higher income countries. The way in which available resources are allocated across competing priorities has a profound effect on how much health is...

Objectives: Network meta-analysis (NMA) methods extend the standard pair-wise framework to allow simultaneous comparison of multiple interventions in a single statistical model. Despite published work on NMA mainly focussing on the synthesis of aggregate data (AD), methods have been developed...

We assess the impact of the English version of prospective payment, termed Payment by Results (PbR), on hospital quality, as measured by in-hospital mortality and 28-day emergency readmission. To do this, we exploit the phased introduction of PbR across hospitals and across three treatments (hip...

Productivity is one of the key measures against which NHS achievements can be judged and is the focus of this report. We update our previous analyses of NHS productivity growth since 2004/05, focussing on the change in NHS productivity between 2011/12 and 2012/13, the latter financial year being...

The use of casemix-based funding mechanisms is increasing internationally. This funding approach potentially offers incentives for a range of diverse objectives, including improvements in efficiency, quality of care and patient choice. However, to date, the application of this approach to mental...