In 2004 the UK government introduced a new ‘pay for performance’ element into the contract for family doctors (FDs). Its universal introduction with no pre-intervention data is not atypical of system-wide health reform but poses a considerable evaluation challenge. We derive estimates of its...

The need to ensure adequate numbers of motivated health professionals is at the forefront of the modernisation of the UK NHS. The aim of this paper is to assess current understanding of the labour supply behaviour of nurses, and to propose an agenda for further research. In particular, the paper...

Research has shown that where nurses’ wages are regulated but wages in other sectors are not this results in spatial variations in the competitiveness of nurses pay and that in England these are correlated with spatial differences in nurses’ labour supply. In France there is general...

The National Health Service (NHS) in England distributes substantial funds to health-care providers in different geographical areas to pay for the health care required by the populations they serve. The formulae that determine this distribution reflect populations' health needs and local...

Individual or personal budgets are part of a growing international trend to encourage greater choice and control over social care services at a time of financial austerity. The authors' evaluation of individual budgets found that levels of allocated resources reflected a range of factors,...

ABSTRACT The aim is to describe and trial a pragmatic method to produce estimates of the incremental cost‐effectiveness of care services from survey data. The main challenge is in estimating the counterfactual; that is, what the patient's quality of life would be if they did not receive that...

A variety of contract types are used in the placement of elderly people in residential and nursing care homes in the UK. Contracts vary according to how and when providers are paid. Among other things, prices can be made contingent on the total quantity of service to be purchased and on...

When evaluating initiatives that make innovative uses of staff it is important to consider the long-term cost consequences of training an appropriately qualified workforce. In order to incorporate the costs of qualifying professionals we need both the costs themselves and an appropriate method...