A practice of anaesthesia

The Republic of Ireland's Medico-Social Research Board spent over half of its £800,000 budget on setting up a hospital inpatient enquiry scheme because of a need "to study the cost effectiveness of health care". It emerged that in Ireland the number of hospital beds used daily per hundred thousand population was ten per cent higher than in Scotland mainly because Irish patients stayed in hospital longer although the number of admissions per hundred thousand population was also slightly higher. Presumably the next step is to determine whether this difference is due to worse disease or less effective hospital care, but the Board has carefully avoided a definition of "cost effectiveness in health care" which is likely to become a major pre-occupation of hospital doctors throughout the British Isles in the next ten years.