Torhild Heggestad

Department of Research and Development, Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway

[ 1 ] - Norwegian Priority Setting in Practice – an Analysis of Waiting Time Patterns Across Medical Disciplines

Background Different strategies for addressing the challenge of prioritizing elective patients efficiently and fairly have been introduced in Norway. In the time period studied, there were three possible outcomes for elective patients that had been through the process of priority setting: (i) high priority with assigned individual maximum waiting time; (ii) low priority without a maximum waitin...

[ 2 ] - Long Waiting Times for Elective Hospital Care – Breaking the Vicious Circle by Abandoning Prioritisation

Background Policies assigning low-priority patients treatment delays for care, in order to make room for patients of higher priority arriving later, are common in secondary healthcare services today. Alternatively, each new patient could be granted the first available appointment. We aimed to investigate whether prioritisation can be part of the reason why waiting times for care are often...