We examine the effects of an intervention to provide easier access to pharmacists for patients with minor ailments. The intervention allowed pharmacists to prescribe and dispense medicines currently limited to general practitioners (GPs) without patients losing their right to free prescriptions....

Long waiting times for inpatient treatment in the UK National Health Service have been a source of popular and political concern, and therefore a target for policy initiatives. In the London Patient Choice Project, patients at risk of breaching inpatient waiting time targets were offered the...

Rationing by waiting time is commonly used in health care systems with zero or low money prices. Some systems prioritise particular types of patient and offer them lower waiting times. We investigate whether prioritisation is welfare improving when the benefit from treatment is the sum of two...

We test the relative income hypothesis that an individual's health depends on the distribution of income in a reference group, as well as on the income of the individual. We use data on 231 208 individuals in Great Britain from 19 rounds of the General Household Survey between 1979 and 2000....

We report an empirical analysis of the responses of the supply and demand for secondary care to waiting list size and waiting times. Whereas previous empirical analyses have used data aggregated to area level, our analysis focuses on the supply responses of a single hospital and the demand...

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence has recently changed its guidelines on discounting costs and effects in economic evaluations. In common with most other regulatory bodies it now requires that health effects should be discounted at the same rate as costs. We show that the guideline...

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...