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statistics

Hawking is right, Jeremy Hunt does egregiously cherry pick the evidence

I’m beginning to think Jeremy Hunt doesn’t actually care what the evidence says on the weekend effect. Last week, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking criticized Hunt for ‘cherry picking’ evidence with regard to the ‘weekend effect’: that patients admitted at the… Read More »Hawking is right, Jeremy Hunt does egregiously cherry pick the evidence

Meeting round-up: 7th annual Vancouver Health Economics Methodology (VanHEM) meeting

The 7th annual Vancouver Health Economics Methodology (VanHEM) meeting took place on June 16 in Vancouver, Canada. This one-day conference brings together health economists from across the Pacific Northwest, including Vancouver, Washington State, and Calgary. This has always been more… Read More »Meeting round-up: 7th annual Vancouver Health Economics Methodology (VanHEM) meeting

Variations in NHS admissions at a glance

Variations in admissions to NHS hospitals are the source of a great deal of consternation. Over the long-run, admissions and the volume of activity required of the NHS have increased, without equivalent increases in funding or productivity. Over the course… Read More »Variations in NHS admissions at a glance

Weekend effect explainer: why we are not the ‘climate change deniers of healthcare’

The statistics underlying the arguments around the weekend effect are complicated. Despite over a hundred empirical studies on the topic, and an observed increase in the risk of mortality for weekend admissions in multiple countries, there is still no real… Read More »Weekend effect explainer: why we are not the ‘climate change deniers of healthcare’

Transformative treatments: a big methodological challenge for health economics

Social scientists, especially economists, are concerned with causal inference: understanding whether and how an event causes a certain effect. Typically, we subscribe to the view that causal relations are reducible to sets of counterfactuals, and we use ever more sophisticated… Read More »Transformative treatments: a big methodological challenge for health economics