this commentary explores some of the issues raised by gilbert et al.short communication, morality and markets in the nhs. the increasing role of market mechanisms and the changing types of healthcare providers together with the use of choice and competition to drive improvements in quality in the national health service (nhs), all have important ethical implications. in order for the nhs to con...

in a recent editorial in this journal pierre-gerlier forest foretells a coming revolution in health policy based on the synthesis of four conceptual innovations and one technological breakthrough. as much as i agree with the intellectual story told in this editorial i present a more skeptical view of the effect of paradigm shifts on healthcare systems on the ground. i argue that ideas triumph w...

We present a generalisation of the standard well known and widely used Metropolis-Hastings algorithm which, unlike the Metropolis-Hastings sampler, can mix well over a target distribution which has separated and possibly narrow modes. The idea arose via a consideration of a space augmented slice sampler where the uniform space required to be sampled for the slice sampler, say I , is augmented w...

BACKGROUND There is a gap in knowledge about how citizen participation impacts governance of free healthcare policies for universal health coverage in low- and middle-income countries. OBJECTIVE This study provides evidence about how social accountability initiatives influenced revenue generation, pooling and fund management, purchasing and capacity of health facilities implementing the free ...

Recently developed adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have been applied successfully to many problems in Bayesian statistics. Grapham is a new open source implementation covering several such methods, with emphasis on graphical models for directed acyclic graphs. The implemented algorithms include the seminal Adaptive Metropolis algorithm adjusting the proposal covariance accordin...

BACKGROUND One of the main objectives of the Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme, at its establishment in 2003, was to ease financial burden of the full cost recovery policy, particularly on the poor. However, currently, majority of the scheme's subscribers are individuals in the upper wealth quintile, as the poor in society rather have not subscribed. We explored the motivational factors as...

We propose that entity queries are generated via a two-step process: users first select entity facts that can distinguish target entities from the others; and then choose words to describe each selected fact. Based on this query generation paradigm, we propose a new entity representation model named as entity factoid hierarchy. An entity factoid hierarchy is a tree structure composed of factoid...

One of the most widely used samplers in practice is the component-wise MetropolisHastings (CMH) sampler that updates in turn the components of a vector spaces Markov chain using accept-reject moves generated from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution of a Markov chain is irregularly shaped, a ‘good’ proposal distribution for one part of the state space might be a ‘poor’ one for ...

introduction discussion of sustainability and sustainable development, regardless of towns and cities would be meaningless cities as the main factor causing instability in the world are, in fact, the concept of urban sustainability and global are stability. environmental crises and urban issues such as air pollution, water, soil and water resources and agricultural land use renewable, global wa...

Metropolis–Hastings algorithms are used to simulate Markov chains with limiting distribution equal to a specified target distribution. The current paper studies target densities on R. In directional Metropolis–Hastings algorithms each iteration consists of three steps i) generate a line by sampling an auxiliary variable, ii) propose a new state along the line, and iii) accept/reject according t...