BACKGROUND: Family planning services are amongst the most highly utilized services in the National Health Service. There have, however, been few empirical studies of the costeffectiveness of these services. METHODS: Two measures of output were used to calculate the cost-effectiveness of family...

There is much interest in international comparisons of health care expenditures, in particular their relation to national income. They have been widely used to judge countries' performance in cost-containment, and in the United Kingdom have been widely quoted in debates about the funding of the...

STUDY OBJECTIVE: To determine the relative costs of prostheses and factors associated with changes in these cost rankings. DESIGN AND SETTING: Economic model using published data. MAIN RESULTS: The main cost drivers are current costs and revision rates. Expected revision costs are a small...

OBJECTIVES: It has become increasingly common for preference-based measures of health-related quality of life to be used in the evaluation of different health-care interventions. For one such measure, The EuroQol, designed to be used for these purposes, it was necessary to derive a single index...

Objectives. The EQ-5D is a preference-based measure of health and is increasingly being used in the evaluation of health technologies. A 'tariff' of values for all 243 EQ-5D health states has been generated using direct valuations on a subset of these states. The tariff is used to express the...

[Executive summary] In the light of the 2006 drought and potentially permanent 'water stress', the government has been reviewing its policies on drought-time restrictions. Droughts have been a constant feature of modern life, irrespective of different systems of water-supply ownership, so the...

The burden of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) to employers and workplaces is significant; and the most important cost to employers and society is lost time from work. ‘Case management’ is a goal-oriented approach to keeping employees at work and facilitating an early return to work. There...

Calendar or timeline techniques have developed in parallel and are used in life course research, and health behaviour and treatment studies. Both types of research seek to reconstruct histories or events in order to understand phenomena. Unsurprisingly a research strategy that seeks to represent...

Objective To examine the effects of different timing of structured interventions for workers on sick leave due to low back pain on return to work (RTW), and the consequences for costs and benefits. Methods Literature reviews were conducted to identify RTW curves and to estimate treatment...

Health services continue to be seen as significant settings for health improvement, and developments continue to be made in the nature of such work, means of optimal delivery and outcomes. This paper builds on previous work by reporting on activity in a series of sites within ‘NHS Health...