This article investigates how the Swedish population values a reduction in the number of suicides in relation to other life-saving interventions within the health care sector. An online discrete choice experiment was conducted with a sample of 1000 Swedish members of the web panel Userneeds to...

National interest in the quality of American health care increased dramatically in 1999. The press, the Institute of Medicine, legislators, physicians, and hospitals joined in a vigorous policy discussion. But a similar debate occurred in 1988, following reports from four public agencies that...

Very little is known about the productive efficiency of the large scale contracting-out mechanism that delivers basic healthcare services in Afghanistan. This study analyses the relative efficiency of basic package of health services (BPHS) facilities and examines the factors associated with the...

The extent of premature death and ill health in the developing world is staggering. Death and ill health on such a scale are matters of concern in their own right. They also foster a brake on economic development. It was these twin concerns that led the international community to put health...

This paper compares health care systems. It looks beyond normal academic, political, or journalistic rhetoric, by exactly sticking to facts, i.e. empirical data (in particular data provided by the WHO) and comprehensive case study analyses. The paper finds that a number of myths and common...

Understanding socioeconomic inequalities in health care is critical for achieving health equity. The aim of this paper is threefold: 1) to quantify inequality in diabetes health care service utilization; 2) to understand determinants of these inequalities in relation to socio-demographic and...

Greek health outcomes compare favourably with the OECD average. However, the health care system is seen as not working well by the population. One source of dissatisfaction is the high proportion of private household spending on health, including informal payments, while public health spending...

In efforts to decrease emergency department (ED) crowding and health care costs, frequent users of ED services have been targeted for interventions to decrease their utilization. Previous studies have had different definitions for frequent users and have considered all frequent users as a...

Non-valvular atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common heart arrhythmia in the elderly population. AF patients are at high-risk of ischemic strokes, but oral anticoagulant (OAC) therapy reduces such risks. Warfarin had been the standard OAC for AF patients, however its effectiveness is highly...