Advancements in our understanding of the causes and correlates of disease mean that we are now able to estimate an individual's level of risk. This, and the ever-increasing need for healthcare interventions to be cost-effective, has led to calls for the introduction of risk-based screening....

Unlike other industrialised countries, the UK deferred the routine introduction of disease-modifying therapies (DMTs) for multiple sclerosis (MS) in favour of an experiment. Between 2002 and 2005, MS sufferers were identified, were offered DMTs only if deemed suitable by their physicians, and...

Health economists use “willingness-to-pay” to assess the prospective value of novel interventions. The technique remains controversial, not least with respect to the formats under which values are elicited. The paper analyses the results of a series of studies of the same intervention valued...

There is evidence that patient choice and the quality of service delivery in primary care can be influenced by the organisation and structure of provision at the local level. However, the formal measurement of structure in primary care has yet to be undertaken. Using data for Coventry, standard...

The development of an internal market in UK public sector health care has introduced hard budget constraints for those general practitioner purchasers who elect to hold their own budgets or 'funds'. Prescription medicines constitute an element of the fundholder's budget and a theoretical model...

The introduction of quasi-markets into the public sector suggests that entrepreneurship may have an increasing role to play within the resulting new structures. This article examines the nature of public sector entrepreneurship in the context of the new arrangements for the provision of primary...

This paper describes an experiment to test the construct validity of contingent valuation, by eliciting women's valuations for the NHS cervical cancer screening programme. It is known that, owing to low levels of knowledge of cancer and screening in the general population, women both...