This paper critiques 'needs assessment' as a basis for allocating public funding of health and disability services and discusses an alternative economics-based approach. In essence, the former approach ignores the effects on health outcomes of health care spending at the margin while the latter...

New Zealand, like most other developed economies, has struggled to establish the best way of organising and delivering publicly financed health care services. Before the 1990s, hospitals and some related services were planned and provided by regionally based, locally elected health boards. This...

Objectives The UK's National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has an explicit cost-effectiveness threshold for deciding whether or not services are to be provided in the National Health Service (NHS), but there is currently little evidence to support the level at which it is...

The London Patient Choice Project (LPCP) was established to offer NHS patients more choice over where and when they receive treatment, and to reduce waiting times. The LPCP offered those patients waiting around 6 months for elective procedures a choice of treatment at an alternative NHS or...

The NHS Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) programme is a significant development in the routine collection and use of patient reported outcome data. Introduced in April 2009, it entails the routine collection of patient reported outcomes from all patients undergoing four elective...

Background: The UK Government is proposing to include “burden of illness” in its proposed scheme for the value‐based pricing (VBP) of branded medicines. The VBP consultation document suggests that medicines that tackle diseases associated with high levels of burden of illness will be...

Objectives: In light of the apparent disconnect between traditional measures of societal well-being such as GDP and reported levels of happiness, governments globally are turning their attention to alternative subjective measures of well-being (SWB) to aid policy decisions. In the context of...