Emergency departments are the front line of health care systems and play a critical role in ensuring an efficient and high-quality response for patients in stress or crisis situations. A growing demand for emergency care might however reduce patients’ satisfaction (through waiting times),...

Although a wide range of studies have tackled the outputs of social capital, fewer efforts have so far been dedicated to unveil its inputs. This study provides new empirical evidence on the determinants of social capital. The assumption to be tested is that the influence of “length of...

Out-of-hours (OOH) services provide urgent primary care when primary care physician (PCP) offices are closed, most often from 5pm on weekdays and all day on weekends and holidays. Based on a policy survey (covering 27 OECD countries) and the existing literature, the working paper describes the...

The COVID 19 pandemic has disproportionately hit some vulnerable population groups. Those living in deprived areas, migrant population, and ethnic minorities are at higher risk of catching and dying from the virus than other groups, and they also face significant indirect health impacts of the...

Ensuring equal access to the latest cancer medicines is one of the most pressing challenges facing OECD health systems today. Despite the emergence of new oncology drugs, disparities in patient access—particularly through clinical trials and early access programs—remain a critical issue....

In the health economics literature there is an ongoing debate over approaches used to estimate the efficiency of health systems at various levels, from the level of the individual hospital - or nursing home - up to that of the health system as a whole. The two most widely used approaches to...

Policy-makers desire an optimal balance of financial incentives to improve productivity and encourage improved quality in primary care, while also avoiding issues of risk-selection inherent to capitation-based payment. In this paper we analyze risk-selection in capitation-based payment by using...

Utilize the concept of stickiness to examine the retention of community nurses across time and draw comparisons by subsector, nurse group and work status.