STUDY OBJECTIVE The aim was to determine the number of years that could be gained by preventing avoidable deaths. DESIGN The study arose from the concept of avoidable causes of death and life expectancy at birth. Four abbreviated life tables were computed. The first included all causes of death; the second excluded all avoidable causes of death; the third and fourth excluded respectively prim...

The paper published in the January 2015 issue of this journal by Gusmano and colleagues entitled “Shanghai rising: health improvements as measured by avoidable mortality since 2000” has spurred this commentary. We discuss controversial issues surrounding the concept of avoidable mortality in health service research in general and Gusmano’s study in particular. The impact of overall social devel...

investments in the extension of health insurance coverage, the strengthening of public health services, as well as primary care and better hospitals, highlights the emerging role of healthcare as part of china’s new growth regime, based on an expansion of services, and redistributive policies. such investments, apart from their central role in terms of relief for low-income people, serve to reb...

conclusions relative high number of avoidable deaths indicates that performance of health system was not desirable in kerman during the studied years. examining trend of avoidable deaths showed that these mortalities are increasing although it is not significant nowadays. however, if this trend continues, it will be very alarming for health care authorities in this region. results two thousand ...

This paper proposes a data envelopment method to separate avoidable and unavoidable mortality risks. As unavoidable mortality is either beyond the control of humanity or likely to be very cost-ineffective to reduce in the short to medium term, avoidable mortality is of much greater practical relevance in measuring wellbeing and inequality. The new method is applied to a dataset consisting of li...

BACKGROUND Avoidable mortality as an indicator for assessing the health system performance has caught the attention of researchers for a long time. In this study we aimed to compare the health system performance using this indicator in rural and urban areas of one of Iran's southern provinces. METHODS All deaths (29916) which happened during 2004-2011 in Bushehr province were assessed. Nolte ...