BACKGROUND Although health care reforms may improve efficiency at the macro level, less is known regarding their effects on the utilization of health care personnel. Following the 2002 Norwegian hospital reform, we studied the productivity of the physician workforce and the effect of personnel mix on this measure in all nineteen Norwegian hospitals from 2001 to 2013. METHODS We used panel ana...

The Chinese government began a major reform of the hospital sector in the early 1980s. The main aim was to increase productivity by phasing out prospective global budgets from the government, and encouraging between-hospital competition for the business of user-pay and insured patients. This goal was to be achieved without unreasonable prejudice to the financial sustainability of hospitals or t...

OBJECTIVES Dyspepsia is defined as persistent or recurrent abdominal pain or discomfort centered in the upper abdomen. Dyspepsia represents up to 8.3% of all primary care physician visits and causes huge economic costs to patients and to the economy as a whole. The aim of this study was to measure the influence of dyspepsia on work productivity of people within the Brazilian workforce. METHOD...

This paper uses the Luenberger productivity index to evaluate the productivity changes of Greek Life insurance companies between 1994 and 2003, combining operational and financial variables. It is found that the average annual productivity change was about 19% and was due to technological progress, whereas the impact of efficiency was minimal. It seems that deregulation, established by the Thir...

Triple product correlations (TPC’s) involving strange quark spin are elucidated in b → uūs process within the standard model. They arise when light quark masses are nonzero. As the momenta and spins of constituent quarks are related to that of the parent hadron, the quark masses are, however small, important and relevant in TPC studies. At this level the TPC’s of interest are of the form ~ss · ...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether the road safety policies introduced between 2000 and 2010 in Catalonia, Spain, which aimed primarily to reduce deaths from road traffic collisions by 50% by 2010, were associated with economic benefits to society. METHODS A cost analysis was performed from a societal perspective with a 10-year time horizon. It considered the costs of: hospital admissions; ambula...