Recent years have seen increased engagement amongst health economists with the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen and others. This paper focuses on the capability approach in relation to the evaluative space used for analysis within health economics. It considers the opportunities that...

This paper reports a qualitative study which sought to operationalise Sen’s capability approach in the context of chronic pain. The resulting capability-instrument will allow treatments and services to be evaluated according to whether they enable users to achieve those things which they value...

In the UK, approaches to policy implementation, service improvement and quality assurance treat policy, management and clinical care as separate, hierarchical domains. They are often based on the central knowledge transfer (KT) theory idea that best practice solutions to complex problems can be...

A number of authors have developed sets of role descriptions that have been used to classify patients' roles in decisions about their health care as either active, collaborative or passive. We explored the validity of two such measures. Twenty women who had recently had a hysterectomy described...

Vaccination against contagious diseases is intended to benefit individuals and contribute to the eradication of such diseases from the population as a whole. The Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine is widely recommended for all children with the aim of protecting against measles, mumps, and...

Information exchange between patients and health professionals is fundamental to achieving patient participation in decision-making and shared decision-making is said to require the exchange of "all information relevant to decision-making". This paper reports on a qualitative investigation of...

Discrete choice experiments have the advantage that they can study preferences in health care where revealed preference data is not readily available. However, as a substitute for actual observed market led data, the experimental set-up for hypothetical situations must mimic the circumstances...