INTRODUCTION In 2010, Alzheimer's Disease International presented estimates of the global cost of illness (COI) of dementia. Since then, new studies have been conducted, and the number of people with dementia has increased. Here, we present an update of the global cost estimates. METHODS This is a societal, prevalence-based global COI study. RESULTS The worldwide costs of dementia were esti...

The quality of the "patient-carer" relationship is the foundation of self-management support and has been shown to influence treatment outcome in relation to psychological and somatic illness, including diabetes. It has long been accepted within applied psychology that the quality of the client-therapist relationship--termed the working alliance--is of central importance to treatment outcome an...

This paper focuses on recent experience in setting up an endoscopy unit in a large regional hospital. The mix of endoscopy in three smaller hospitals, draining into the large hospital endoscopy unit, has enabled the authors to comment on practical and achievable steps towards creating best practice endoscopy in the regional setting. The challenges of using what is available from an infrastructu...

Global healthcare in the 21st century is characterized by evidence-based medicine (EBM), patient-centered care, and cost effectiveness. EBM involves clinical decisions being made by integrating patient preference with medical treatment evidence and physician experiences. The Center for Value-Based Medicine suggested value-based medicine (VBM) as the practice of medicine based upon the patient-p...

This article describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a worksheet used by nursing faculty in a graduate clinical nurse specialist course to assist students in learning to estimate the cost-effectiveness of patient-education programs.1 The worksheet was found to be a satisfactory method of facilitating student learning and could also be used in the service arena to evaluate t...

We present a new framework for assessing the effects of hospital closures on social welfare and the local economy. While patient welfare necessarily declines when patients lose access to a hospital, closures also tend to reduce costs. We study five hospital closures in two states and find that urban hospital bailouts reduce aggregate social welfare: on balance, the cost savings from closures mo...

BACKGROUND Free tuberculosis control fail to protect patients from substantial medical and non-medical expenditure, thus a greater degree of disaggregation of patient cost is needed to fully capture their context and inform policymaking. METHODS A retrospective cross-sectional study was conducted on a convenience sample of six health districts of Southern Benin. From August 2008 to February 2...