Value for money is becoming increasing important in the current NHS climate. The Audit Commission, a statutory body appointed to provide an external audit service for the NHS in England and Wales, aims to work with audited bodies to identify economy, efficiency and effectiveness in the services offered by the NHS to help improve patient care.

Surgical shoes are commonly prescribed by orthopaedic surgeons and rheumatologists. The shoes include both bespoke surgical shoes, which are specially designed and fitted, and "comfort shoes," which are commercially made soft leather or suede shoes and are cheaper to prescribe. Comfort shoes usually cost 40% less than bespoke shoes and appear more cosmetically acceptable to the patient. All pat...

JCPH – Vol. 63, n 1 – janvier–février 2010 92 Some of you have heard me speak about “the pharmacist narcotic effect”. By this I mean that some physicians may be skeptical of the value of pharmacists, but when they finally have the opportunity to work closely with a clinical pharmacist and personally experience the value that this individual brings to the health care team, they become “addicted”...

As the fiscal agent of the Canadian Federal government, the Bank of Canada uses a sequence of multi-unit, sealed-bid, discriminatory-price auctions to manage excess cash reserves and to sterilize the effects of fiscal operations, thus ensuring that its monetary-policy goals are met. These auctions, which form an important part of the short-term loan market in Canada, provide a unique laboratory...

In this paper we study the risk perception of traffic participants. Firstly, we give an overview of previously used methodologies for the monetary valuation of transport safety. These methodologies do not distinguish between the individual’s assessment of probabilities and her valuation of possible outcomes. A great disadvantage of these approaches is therefore that one has to make the assumpti...

The Time Value of Money is a important concept in Financial Management. The Time Value of Money includes the concepts of future value and discounted value or present value. In the present article, the basic notions and illustrate with their application in the field of investment which is presented in the mathematical terms in form of theorems and we also presented the applications of some well ...

The fMRI visual field map (VFM) is obtained by using a rotating-expanding visual target to identify the area of the retina that corresponds to activated visual cortex. Since fMRI data is (1) relative rather than absolute and (2) has a degree of noise that may mask the activation, identifying differences in VFMs requires a model that will differentiate changes in the underlying structure from di...

Graph has become increasingly important in modeling complicated structures and schemaless data such as proteins, chemical compounds, and XML documents. Given a graph query, it is desirable to retrieve graphs quickly from a large database via graph-based indices. Different from the existing methods, our approach, called VFM (Vertex to Frequent Feature Mapping), makes use of vertices and decision...