In Ontario, Community Care Access Centres (CCACs) oversee managed competition by home care agencies for service delivery contracts. Contracts are to be awarded to the agencies that provide the highest quality services at the lowest price. We examined the impact of two rounds of competitive...

Measuring Consistency of Personnel in Home care: Current Challenges and Findings Consistency of personnel is important to ensuring continuity of care for home care clients. It is particularly important to those clients who are at high risk for adverse effects when provider changes occur....

Genetic testing has long been part of Canada’s health system, but the scope of genetic testing is growing into new areas. Whereas traditional tests predominantly foretell the health of future generations, new tests increasingly tell individuals about their own health and risks. And whereas...

Needs-based health care funding methods are increasingly being considered for the Canadian health care system, particularly as a basis for allocating funds from central Ministries of Health to local and regional health authorities. Standardized Mortality Ratios are one of the commonly used...

Purpose. The paper reviews the Health Utilities Index (HUI®) as a means to describe health status and obtain utility scores reflecting health-related quality of life (HRQL). Materials. The HUI Mark 2 (HUI2) and Mark 3 (HUI3) classification and scoring systems are described. The methods used to...

This study examined the components of the benchmarks used to monitor consistency of provider by home care agencies that competed for nursing and homemaking contracts in the Hamilton-Wentworth Community Care Access Centre. Comparisons of the impact of varying components of the benchmarks on...

Objectives - To examine within an economically homogeneous group whether there is a gradient in life span by position in the social hierarchy. Methods - Using birth and death information for British peers and baronets, we calculated average life span (in years) for first- and inherited-title...

When choosing between mutually exclusive treatment options, it is common to construct a cost-effectiveness frontier on the cost-effectiveness plane that represents efficient points from among the treatment choices. Treatment options internal to the frontier are considered inefficient and are...