forest and colleagues have persuasively made the case that policy capacity is a fundamental prerequisite to health reform. they offer a comprehensive life-cycle definition of policy capacity and stress that it involves much more than problem identification and option development. i would like to offer a canadian perspective. if we define health reform as re-orienting the health system from acut...

Assume that the surplus process of an insurance company is described by a general Lévy process and that possible dividend pay-outs to shareholders are restricted to random discrete times which are determined by an independent renewal process. Under this setting we show that the optimal dividend pay-out policy is a band-policy. If the renewal process is a Poisson process, it is further shown tha...

We consider the joint pricing and inventory control problem for a single product whose demand distribution in each period is determined both by whether or not a sale price is offered in the current period, and the number of periods since the last time the sale price was offered. We show that optimal inventory ordering policy is a state dependent base stock policy; however, the optimal pricing p...

We examine the scope of inquiry into the measurement and assessment of the state public health policy environment. We argue that there are gains to be made by looking systematically at policies both within and across health domains. We draw from the public health and public policy literature to develop the concepts of interdomain and intradomain policy comprehensiveness and illustrate how these...

PURPOSE The first real-time-MRI-guided radiotherapy system has been installed in a clinic and it is being evaluated. Presence of magnetic field (MF) during radiation output calibration may have implications on ionization measurements and there is a possibility that standard calibration protocols may not be suitable for dose measurements for such devices. In this study, we evaluated whether a st...

Pulsatile drug delivery systems (PDDS) are gaining importance as they deliver a drug at specific time as per the pathophysiological need of the disease, resulting in improved therapeutic efficacy as well as compliance. Diseases wherein PDDS are promising include asthma, peptic ulcer, cardiovascular diseases, arthritis, attention deficit syndrome in children, and hypercholesterolemia. These deli...

This article addresses policymaking related to Emergency Care Units (ECU) in the State of Rio de Janeiro between 2007 and 2013, duly identifying the relationships between the various levels of government in this process. It prioritized the context of policy formulation, the factors that motivated the inclusion and maintenance of ECUs on the state agenda and the process of how the policy was imp...

This study clarified the relationship between children’s toes and kindergartens’ barefoot policy by comparing the condition of untouched toes, that is, toes not touching the ground while standing normally, between children who attended kindergartens following a barefoot policy and those who did not. Participants were 552 children (299 boys and 253 girls) attending kindergartens that followed a ...