Pre-budget months of recent years have seen the opposing factions of industrial and public health lobbies jostling for influence over the Chancellor's alcohol and tobacco tax policy. Industry petitions for lower tax rates, citing factory closures and redundancy figures as evidence of the...

Integrated care is often perceived as a solution for some of the major challenges faced by health and social care systems. In these systems, 20% of the population accounts for 80% of the expenditure on care [1]. These ‘high users’ are typically people with one or more long-term...

The purpose of this research is to illustrate: i) the principles of what assessments are required when considering the need for additional evidence and the priority of proposed research; and ii) how these assessments might be informed by quantitative analysis based on standard methods of...

We analyse the impact of the provision of care on the health and quality of life (QoL) of mature female informal caregivers using a representative sample drawn from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We match each informal caregiver with a non-carer using Propensity...

Working conditions in Western countries have changed dramatically in the last twenty years, witnessing the emergence of new forms of employment contracts. The number of "standard" fulltime permanent jobs has decreased, while non-standard work arrangements such as temporary, contingent or...

Recent and planned policy changes in the NHS, including the abolition of the Medical Practices Committee, revised tendering arrangements for new practices, readily available information on practices via NHS Choices, and letting patients register with any practice, will increase potential...

Objectives: We investigate variations in costs and length of stay (LoS) among hospitals for ten clinical treatments to assess: 1. The extent to which resource use is driven by the characteristics of patients and of the type and quality of care they receive; 2. After taking these characteristics...