Health status varies across socio-economic groups and health status is generally assumed to predict health care needs. Therefore the need for health care varies across socio-economic groups, and studies of equity in the distribution of health care between socio-economic groups must compare...

In several countries formulae for allocating resources to regions are derived using national average relationships between population characteristics and health service use. However, there may be significant regional heterogeneity in health care delivery which, has two main implications for a...

Levels of alcohol consumption tend to be similar for individuals living in the same household. This may be because: (a) individuals with similar characteristics collect in households (correlated effects); (b) individuals in the same household are influenced by common factors (exogenous effects);...

Patterns of self-reported morbidity and general practitioner (GP) utilization exhibit complex age, sex and time heterogeneity. Underlying patterns are often obscured by data which are overly 'rough' because of noise associated with adjacent year fluctuations. In this paper we describe methods to...

Many health-care systems allocate funding according to measures of need. The utilisation approach for measuring need rests on the assumptions that use of health care is determined by demand and supply and that need is an important element of demand. By estimating utilisation models which allow...