This commentary talks about patient involvement in one of the biggest EU projects to date-U-BIOPRED. It describes how people and carers of people with asthma have been able to develop and drive their input and have their voice heard among the >200 healthcare professional project members. Five key principles for the success of the patient involvement group are presented: involve early, involve d...

INTRODUCTION Patient and public involvement in healthcare planning, service development and health-related research has received significant attention. However, evidence about the role of patient involvement in quality improvement work is more limited. We aimed to characterize patient involvement in three improvement projects and to identify strengths and weaknesses of contrasting approaches. ...

The participation of private capital in public infrastructure investment projects has been sought by many governments who perceive this as a way to overcome budgetary constraints and foster economic growth. For some types of projects, this investment may require government participation in the form of project guarantees in order to reduce the risk of the private investor. As a consequence, the ...

In this paper we investigate to what extent perceptions of economic conditions, policy-oriented evaluations, and blame attribution affected Californians’ involvement in political activities in 2010. We use a statistical methodology that allows us to study not only the behavior of the average citizen, but also the behavior of ‘‘types’’ of citizens with latent predispositions that incline them to...

Answer. There is no single best way to capture the budgetary effects of federal pension plans. As required by law, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the budgetary effects of federal defined benefit pension plans on a cash basis—that is, transactions are recorded when annuity payments are made or revenues are received. Although that method recognizes the cost of outlays when they occur, ...

The allocation problem in health care can be characterised as a mathematical programming problem but attempts to incorporate uncertainty in costs and effect have suffered from important limitations. A two-stage stochastic mathematical programming formulation is developed and applied to a numerical example to explore and demonstrate the implications of this more general and comprehensive approac...

U.S. federal budget dynamics, as a major attribute of the legislative and bureaucratic decision-making processes, increasingly calls into question the scholarly focus on incrementalism. What constitutes a “small” change is largely unspecifi ed in previous research that has also been unable to assess incrementalism across multiple levels of aggregation. Using a unique budgetary database, this ar...

The bias against mangrove areas in siting fish farms prompted a comparison of the cost structure and yield performance in upland and mangrove locations. Tools utilized included descriptive statistics, budgetary and cash flow analyses and profitability ratios. Empirical results revealed that substantial revenue could be realized from both farms. While the upland farms yielded average gross reven...