service Email alerting box at the top left of the article Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article-sign up in the

BACKGROUND In the field of health technology assessment (HTA), there are several approaches that can be used for ethical analysis. However, there is a scarcity of literature that critically evaluates and compares the strength and weaknesses of these approaches when they are applied in practice. In this paper, we analyse the applicability of some selected approaches for addressing ethical issues...

Your editorial and analysis (November 26) relating to the death of the 17-month-old boy known as Baby P raise many issues about the way we deal with the safeguarding of children and young people.

Approximately 1 in 3 adults in the United States has cardiovascular disease (CVD), and this burden is more pronounced in those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and from certain minority ethnic groups.1 Modest sustained lifestyle adjustments can decrease CVD burden, but initiating and maintaining these changes is challenging. A complex interplay of patient, provider, and system factors ca...

Evidence-based mental healthcare is evolving rapidly. There is a need for well-tested and effective interventions that are suited to culturally diverse populations. This editorial considers the findings from the SITARA study. There are a substantial number of implications for research, policy and practice.

Preventing chronic diseases, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes, requires complex interventions, involving multi-component and multi-level efforts that are tailored to the contexts in which they are delivered. Despite an increasing number of complex interventions in public health, many fail to be 'scaled up'. This study aimed to increase understanding of how and under what cond...

BACKGROUND TO THE DEBATE The UK Medical Research Council defines complex interventions as those comprising "a number of separate elements which seem essential to the proper functioning of the interventions although the 'active ingredient' of the intervention that is effective is difficult to specify." A typical example is specialist care on a stroke unit, which involves a wide range of health p...

A statistical framework based on potential outcomes has been developed in which causal effects can be unambiguously defined, and the assumptions needed for their estimation clearly stated. This has also led to the development of new statistical methods that are especially designed for making causal inferences from non-randomised exposures under transparent, less restrictive and more plausible a...

This article outlines the contribution that ethnography could make to process evaluations for trials of complex health-behaviour interventions. Process evaluations are increasingly used to examine how health-behaviour interventions operate to produce outcomes and often employ qualitative methods to do this. Ethnography shares commonalities with the qualitative methods currently used in health-b...

Approximately 1 in 3 adults in the United States has cardiovascular disease (CVD), and this burden is more pronounced in those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and from certain minority ethnic groups.1 Modest sustained lifestyle adjustments can decrease CVD burden, but initiating and maintaining these changes is challenging. A complex interplay of patient, provider, and system factors ca...