Rational care needed, not rationing.

It's time for rational rationing.

Rational requesting or rationing testing?

T he UK government has acknowledged that up to 70% of medical diagnoses now rely on pathology laboratory analyses. One consequence of such reliance is an ever increasing laboratory workload, usually, in National Health Service laboratories, at a rate in excess of the financial resources to support it. It follows that this demand can only be serviced by increased efficiency. One area where deman...

Can rationing of cardiological services be rational?

In the United Kingdom there is a pervading perception that provision of health resources has not kept up with the availability of effective clinical procedures. By international standards expenditure on health services expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product remains low.' To clinicians the system feels increasingly tight financially because resources are not available to meet expres...

Rationing and critical care medicine.

As healthcare expenditures have continued to grow in the United States and elsewhere, the demand for cost-cutting measures has increased. This has led many to wonder if we are, in fact, rationing health care. Critical care is characterized by very high expenditures on a relatively few number of patients, many of whom do not survive, and it is therefore a likely place where rationing could occur...

Rationing health care in Canada.

Canada has been able to develop a fairly successful system of healthcare rationing by balancing the conflicting concerns of equal access and cost efficiency, federal funding and provincial control, and public sector management and private sector provision. Financial constraints limit the kinds of services included within the notion of equal access, however, forcing healthcare providers to make ...