Antiretroviral therapy (ART) is becoming available in South Africa. Demand will exceed supply; thus, difficult decisions will have to be made in allocating ART. The majority of those treated for HIV are likely to be in cities, because health infrastructure and personnel are concentrated in urban centers. We predict the epidemiological impact of drug allocation strategies (DAS) by using a spatia...

BACKGROUND Agency is a pervasive feature of the health care market, with doctors acting as agents for both patients and the health care system. In a context of scarce resources, doctors are required to take opportunity cost into account when prescribing treatments, while cost containment policies cannot overlook their active role in determining health care resource allocation. This paper addres...

BACKGROUND The system to allocate scarce transplantable livers has been criticized for not giving enough weight to the prognoses of the patients receiving the transplants, but little research has been done looking at how the public weights the relative importances of efficacy and equity in distributing the organs. METHODS This study was an experimental survey of prospective jurors asked to di...

INTRODUCTION Healthcare decision-makers are increasingly expected to balance increasing demand for health services with a finite budget. The role of economic evaluation in healthcare is increasing and this research provides decision-makers with new information about the management of Clostridium difficile infection, from an economic perspective. METHODS A model-based economic evaluation was u...

The rapid progress in medical technology makes it unavoidable to ration health care. In the discussion how to ration many people claim that principles of justice in distributing scarce resources should be applied. In this paper we argue that medical resources are not scarce as such but scarcity is a necessary by-product of collective financing arrangements such as social health insurance. So th...

In recent years, shortages of radioisotopes that cannot be stockpiled have created a scenario in which they may be considered, periodically, a scarce medical resource. This discussion focuses on the just allocation of medical radioisotopes and presents the dominant ethical frameworks for rationing and priority setting in the patient populations most affected. Priority setting is necessary when ...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether a moral reasoning exercise can improve response quality to surveys of healthcare priorities METHODS A randomised internet survey focussing on patient age in healthcare allocation was repeated twice. From 2574 internet panel members from the USA and Canada, 2020 (79%) completed the baseline survey and 1247 (62%) completed the follow-up. We elicited respondent pre...