Traditional treatment strategies and public health interventions aimed at reducing the incidence of obesity are proving inadequate at controlling the global epidemic of this condition. The main focus of any intervention should be on preventing small excesses of weight, which lead to large weight gain over time, as once a large amount of excess weight is gained, it is very difficult to lose. The...

BACKGROUND In the Rationing of Nursing Care in Switzerland Study, implicit rationing of care was the only factor consistently significantly associated with all six studied patient outcomes. These results highlight the importance of rationing as a new system factor regarding patient safety and quality of care. Since at least some rationing of care appears inevitable, it is important to identify ...

Despite all the recent controversy, rationing has always been a part of medical decision making. Figure I presents a spectrum of ways in which health care can be rationed. Whether imposed by a market system in which price determines access, a triage system where care is distributed on the basis of need defined largely by the medical community, or a queue system in which time and the waiting pro...

Sir John Boyd Orr (1937) demonstrated that in the social and economic conditions prevailing in Great Britain during the nineteen-thirties one-tenth of the population was consuming food which was both insufficient in quantity and unsatisfactory in quality when compared with accepted dietary standards. This underfeeding was associated with much ill health and poor physical development. The outbre...

BACKGROUND Implicit rationing of nursing care is the withholding of or failure to carry out all necessary nursing measures due to lack of resources. There is evidence supporting a link between rationing of nursing care, nurses' perceptions of their professional environment, negative patient outcomes, and placing patient safety at risk. The aims of the study were: a) To explore whether patient s...

Background: It is difficult to provide health care services to all those in need of such services due to limited resources and unlimited demands. Thus, priority setting and rationing have to be applied. This study aimed at critically examining the concept of rationing in health sector and identifying its purposes, influencing factors, mechanisms, and outcomes.     Methods: The c...

We introduce a new operator for general rationing problems in which, besides conflicting claims, individual baselines play an important role in the rationing process. The operator builds onto ideas of composition, which are not only frequent in rationing, but also in related problems such as bargaining, choice, and queuing. We characterize the operator and show how it preserves some standard ax...

This paper provides an empirical examination of the frequency and determinants of two forms of non-price rationing in rural credit markets in northern Peru. Quantity rationing is the conventional form of non-price rationing whereby a household with positive demand for credit is denied access. Risk rationing, in contrast, occurs when a household voluntarily withdraws from the credit market for f...