BACKGROUND Across a range of healthcare settings, 5% of the population accounts for half of healthcare spending: these patients are identified as a 'high-cost population'. Characterising high-cost users is essential for predicting potential high-cost patients and the development of appropriate interventions to improve the management and financing of these patients. OBJECTIVE This cross-sectio...

The aim of this study was to estimate the costs and the health benefits of the following interventions: increasing access to improved water supply and sanitation facilities, increasing access to in house piped water and sewerage connection, and providing household water treatment, in ten WHO sub-regions. The cost-effectiveness of each intervention was assessed in terms of US dollars per disabil...

BACKGROUND Household decision-makers decide about service use based largely on the costs and perceived benefits of health interventions. Very often this leads to different decisions than those imagined by health planners, resulting in under-utilisation of public services like immunisation. In the case of Lasbela district in the south of Pakistan, only one in every ten children is immunised desp...

Background: To address family planning for crisis-affected communities, in 2011 and 2012, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Women’s Refugee Commission undertook a multi-country assessment to document knowledge of family planning, beliefs and practices of refugees, and the state of service provision in the select refugee settings of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh; Ali Addeh, Dji...

This study attempts to determine the extent to which human potential may be unlocked by government or other formal sector actions that induce voluntary contributions by individuals to the activities of Indonesia’s posyandus or village health posts. Posyandus have been an important feature of Indonesia’s public health system and have contributed substantially to the country’s success in lowering...

This paper provides new estimates of the effect of household gun prevalence on homicide rates, and infers the marginal external cost of handgun ownership. The estimates utilize a superior proxy for gun prevalence, the percentage of suicides committed with a gun, which we validate. Using countyand state-level panels for 20 years, we estimate the elasticity of homicide with respect to gun prevale...

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that exposure to residential radon causes 7,000 to 30,000 lung cancer deaths per year. The EPA has provided extensive technical analysis of and support for their recommended policy response of remediating all homes above a threshold level of radon, but these and other benefit-cost analyses typically do not consider many important dimensions...

Raising children demands a considerable amount of parental time, obliging working parents either to further reduce their leisure or to buy child-care services in the market. Parents may face additional opportunity costs upon deciding to participate in the labor market, but these are difficult to measure. Using a survey instrument in Belgium and Germany, we estimate the income compensation neede...

OBJECTIVE To determine the cost of kala-azar (KA) to patients in Bihar, India. METHOD A semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect costs of illness--direct (medical; non-medical) and indirect costs (work days lost). After screening the community known to be endemic for visceral leishmaniasis (VL), households (HHs) with VL were recruited which reported a case of KA who received treatmen...