Hospitals involve a complex socio-technical health system, where communication failures influence the quality of patient care. Research indicates the importance of social identity and intergroup relationships articulated through power, control, status and competition. This study focused on...

Hospital acquired infections (HAI) are costly but many are avoidable. Evaluating prevention programmes requires data on their costs and benefits. Estimating the actual costs of HAI (a measure of the cost savings due to prevention) is difficult as HAI changes cost by extending patient length of...

This work examines the quality of the cost methods used to derive patient level costs in 45 economic evaluations conducted alongside randomised controlled trials. The perspective of the cost analysis, the methods used to determine quantities and values of resources and how the cost data were...

In 2008 the Australian government decided to remove white blood cells from all blood products. This policy of universal leucodepletion was a change to the existing policy of supplying leucodepleted products to high risk patients only. The decision was made without strong information about the...

Payment for Ecosystem Service schemes have become widely discussed in the academic literature and in policy circles over the past 10 years, and indeed an increasing number of schemes have been put in place across the world. This paper has four objectives. First, to explain the idea of a Payment...

Payments for ecosystem service outputs have become a popular policy prescription for a range of agri-environmental schemes. The focus of this paper is on the choice of sets of instruments in an ecosystem service principal-agent model that addresses adverse selection and moral-hazard. Results...

The paper analyses the differences of technical, allocative, cost and scale efficiencies of irrigated and rain-fed rice farmers in Sri Lanka in two different perspectives; first, relative to a common metafrontier, defined as the boundary of an unrestricted technology set and second relative to...

A land retirement policy whereby land is taken out of agriculture and converted to natural vegetation or forestry has the potential to reduce environmental damage related to dryland salinity in Western Australia. This paper uses some recent results in the theory of directional distance functions...