This paper considers the relative healthcare expenditure needs of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It applies the NHS weighted capitation formula – used to allocate resources to English Primary Care Trusts – to Health Boards in Wales and Scotland and Health and Social Care Trusts in Northern Ireland. According to this formula, per capita healthcare expenditure need in Wales is 16%...

One of the aims of the English National Health Service (NHS) reform program has been to give higher priority to chronic care. Chronic care policy has focused on self-management, disease management, and case management, alongside a number of related initiatives. A start has been made in implementing these initiatives, and some are beginning to demonstrate benefits, like the new pay-for-performan...

Introduction Healthcare Resource Groups [HRG] are the mechanism by which patient activity is classified according to case mix in England. They are the primary funding mechanism for acute care in the English National Health Service [NHS], under the Department of Health's Payment by Results [PbR] national policy. This Department collects annual cost data ('Reference Costs'), and uses this as the ...

British Association of Dermatologists’ guidelines for the management of contact dermatitis 2017 G.A. Johnston, L.S. Exton, M.F. Mohd Mustapa, J.A. Slack, I.H. Coulson, J.S.C. English and J.F. Bourke Department of Dermatology, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, Infirmary Square, Leicester LE1 5WW, U.K. British Association of Dermatologists, Willan House, 4 Fitzroy Square, London W1T 5H...

BACKGROUND The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) galvanised debate in the United States (US) over universal health coverage. Comparison with countries providing universal coverage may illustrate whether the ACA can improve health outcomes and reduce disparities. We aimed to compare quality and disparities in hypertension management by socio-economic position in the US and England...

Studies of hospital efficiency seldom lead to changes in practice, partly because recommendations are unspecific or results are not seen as robust. We describe a method to compare hospital costs that utilises patient-level data. We perform a two-stage analysis in which we first consider factors that explain costs among patients and then across hospital departments. We illustrate our approach by...

BACKGROUND The 1998 UK government White Paper Smoking Kills emphasises that normal practice should be for general practitioners (GPs), practice nurses, and others to offer advice and support to smokers in their efforts to stop. However, GPs are not allowed to write NHS prescriptions for nicotine-replacement therapy, even though this is the only effective pharmaceutical treatment available in th...

Aims The Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Medical Training Initiative is a scheme aimed at psychiatrists from lower and middle-income countries to work train in the National Health Service (NHS) UK for up 2 years before returning their home countries. They came various cultural backgrounds, however, there lack study being done on how these differences experiences are impacting newly recruited MT...