The recently delivered Queen’s speech set out the government’s plan for “a 7-day NHS”. This vision is a reaction to alarming statistics that mortality rates are increased by 11% for patients admitted to hospital on a Saturday, and 16% if… Read More »The economics of a 7-day NHS
Today sees the publication of surgeons’ death rates on the MyNHS website (see Guardian and BBC stories). The website presents full lists of surgeons by specialty alongside either blue circles with a large ‘OK’ inside, grey circles with question marks, or… Read More »Is there any use in publishing surgeons’ death rates?
This month’s meeting will take place Monday 3rd June, at 5pm London time. That’ll be midday in Boston and 6pm in Geneva. Join the Facebook event here. We’ll also hold an antipodal meeting 12 hours later on Tuesday 4th June, at… Read More »#HEJC for 03/06/2013
In 1976, Robert Lucas wrote a paper that articulated a common criticism of macroeconomic policy-making based on historical data. The essence of the critique was that, since the parameters of macroeconometric models were not structural, they were liable to change… Read More »The Lucas critique and hospital quality
Endogeneity is everywhere. There is always a reason to assume that there is some endogeneity in a model; sometimes it can’t be totally eliminated and we must just reduce it to acceptable levels. Health economists produce research that often is… Read More »The curse of endogeneity in the clinical literature
Discussions of hospital organisation focus a lot on how particular services should be arranged in order to provide high quality care without sacrificing on equity. Many studies, looking at a wide range of different procedures, have identified a benefit from… Read More »Managed clinical networks
Now that the Health and Social Care Bill is the Health and Social Care Act, more focus will be placed on sources of information regarding provider performance. In order for patients to make informed choices about where they wish to… Read More »Making conclusions about provider quality
In the health economics literature we often treat a hospital as a healthcare producing ‘firm’. We define cost-functions and perform efficiency analysis, for example. However, this sort of analysis is certainly hampered by the difficulty in measuring healthcare production. One… Read More »Human capital, endogenous growth and hospital performance