BACKGROUND The World Health Organisation estimates disabling hearing loss to be around 5.3%, while a study of hearing impairment and auditory pathology in Limpopo, South Africa found a prevalence of nearly 9%. Although Sign Language Interpreters (SLIs) improve the communication challenges in health care, they are unaffordable for many signing Deaf people and people with disabling hearing loss. ...

BACKGROUND Rare chronic diseases of childhood are often complex and associated with multiple health issues. Such conditions present significant demands on health services, but the degree of these demands is seldom reported. This study details the utilisation of hospital services and associated costs in a single case of surfactant protein C deficiency, an example of childhood interstitial lung d...

BACKGROUND: BPD is a serious mental illness in which psychotherapy has been shown to improve patient outcomes and reduce the use of health services. In most studies of psychotherapy, lower use of health services has been taken to imply lower health service costs. However, the costs of psychotherapy can offset any cost savings due to reduced use of other health services. AIMS OF THE STUDY: To es...

BACKGROUND Most models of health services use or costs include gender as a covariate, combining data for men and women in analyses. This strategy may obscure differences in underlying processes producing differential health care use by men and women, particularly in examinations of factors that affect health care use and differ by gender (e.g. alcohol consumption and depression). AIMS To exam...

A population's medical need represents its illness burden. Medical demand represents the service level requested for a particular need. Medical care costs are, in large part, a function of need and demand. Our review of health education programs designed to reduce health risks and reduce costs identified thirty-two programs with documented effectiveness, generally achieving claims reductions of...

BACKGROUND Rates of chronic disease are escalating around the world. To date health service evaluations have focused on interventions for single chronic diseases. However, evaluations of the effectiveness of new intervention strategies that target single chronic diseases as well as multimorbidity are required, particularly in areas outside major metropolitan centres where access to services, su...

OBJECTIVE To research the effects of changes in health service utilization and quality on the costs of the Basic Package of Health Services (BPHS) in 13 provinces of Afghanistan. METHODS The study grouped data from 355 health facilities and more than 4000 health posts into 21 data points that represented 21 different nongovernmental organization contracts for service delivery between April 20...

BACKGROUND The Government of the Republic of Kenya is in the process of implementing health care reforms. However, poor knowledge about costs of health care services is perceived as a major obstacle towards evidence-based, effective and efficient health care reforms. Against this background, the Ministry of Health of Kenya in cooperation with its development partners conducted a comprehensive c...

Calls for medical care cost containment are all around us. Although the evidence that costs are too high is strong, the evidence that they are rising too quickly is much weaker. The principal cause of increasing costs appears to be the increased capabilities of medicine; the scant evidence available suggests that to date the public has wanted to pay for most of these capabilities. Effective glo...