CONTEXT Our objectives were to investigate the timeliness of formulary decision-making in Atlantic Canada, including the Common Drug Review (CDR) process and the adoption of positive CDR recommendations by Atlantic Canadian provincial public drug plans, and to determine the degree of cost shifting to private payers. METHODS Dates of formulary listing decisions from Atlantic Canadian provincia...

To address rising energy use and CO2 emissions, China’s leadership has enacted energy and CO2 intensity targets under the Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2011–2015), which are defined at both the national and provincial levels. We develop a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model with global coverage that disaggregates China’s 30 provinces and includes energy system detail, and apply it to assess th...

BACKGROUND Vietnam has achieved great improvements in maternal healthcare outcomes, but there is evidence of increasing inequity. Disadvantaged groups, predominantly ethnic minorities and people living in remote mountainous areas, do not gain access to maternal health improvements despite targeted efforts from policymakers. OBJECTIVE This study identifies underlying structural barriers to equ...

The Middle Persian word sahrestān had often been translated as ‘provincial capital’. Cereti examines an impressive corpus of texts belonging to the Zoroastrian tradition, such Sahrenstānīhā-ī-Ērānshar, Bundahisn, Dēnkard, Kārnāmag ī Ardaxsīr Pābagān, Gujastag Abālis, Sāyast nē-Sāyast, Yoist Friyān, Pahlavi commentary Widēwdād, inscriptions Sāpūr I and Kerdīr at Ka’aba-e Zartost Narseh’s one Pai...

Jing Du and Yong Han Department of Gastroenterology, Zhejiang Provincial People’s Hospital, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China; Clinical Research Institute, Zhejiang Provincial People’s Hospital, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China; People’s Hospital of Hangzhou Medical College, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China; and Key Laboratory of Tumor Molecular Diagnosis and Individualized Medicine ...

BACKGROUND The Contextualized Health Research Synthesis Program (CHRSP), developed in 2007 by the Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Applied Health Research, produces contextualized knowledge syntheses for health-system decision makers. The program provides timely, relevant, and easy-to-understand scientific evidence; optimizes evidence uptake; and, most importantly, attunes research question...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have concluded that there is significant variation in drug coverage across Canadian provinces because conventional measures of inter-rater reliability for formulary listings are low. We sought to investigate whether conventional methods are appropriate for formulary concordance measurement by testing the hypotheses that (a) conventionally measured variations in provi...