BACKGROUND Deceased donor kidneys are a scarce health resource, yet patient preferences for organ allocation are largely unknown. The aim of this study was to determine patient preferences for how kidneys should be allocated for transplantation. METHODS Patients on dialysis and kidney transplant recipients were purposively selected from two centres in Australia to participate in nominal/focus...

Conservation efforts and emergency medicine face comparable problems: how to use scarce resources wisely to conserve valuable assets. In both fields, the process of prioritising actions is known as triage. Although often used implicitly by conservation managers, scientists and policymakers, triage has been misinterpreted as the process of simply deciding which assets (e.g. species, habitats) wi...

Today, the hopelessly ill who are insured must choose between futile treatment and prolonged morbidity. Legalizing physician-assisted death for the hopelessly ill would broaden patient choice and conserve scarce resources. To ensure that the saved resources will not be re-channeled to more futile treatments for other hopelessly ill patients, those who choose dignified passage should be allowed ...

In order to avoid both starvation and disease, animals must allocate resources between energy reserves and immune defence. We investigate the optimal allocation. We find that animals with low reserves choose to allocate less to defence than animals with higher reserves because when reserves are low it is more important to increase reserves to reduce the risk of starvation in the future. In gene...

Wireless networking is becoming an increasingly important and popular way of providing global information access to users on the move. One of the main challenges for seamless mobility is the availability of simple and robust Channel Allocation algorithm. The radio propagation environment and related handoff challenges are different in cellular structures. A handoff algorithm with fixed paramete...

The power of each sensor node in wireless sensor networks for signal detection applications is scarce and limited. Thus, the allocation of power resource of a node should make the detection performance of the whole network maximum, which is complex due to the detection probability of the whole system cannot be expressed explicitly. The ant colony optimization algorithm is good at solving multid...

As healthcare resources become increasingly scarce due to growing demand and stagnating budgets, the need for effective priority setting and resource allocation will become ever more critical to providing sustainable care to patients. While societal values should certainly play a part in guiding these processes, the methodology used to capture these values need not necessarily be limited to mul...

Scheduling and sequencing is concerned with the optimum allocation of scarce resources over time. Scheduling deals with defining which activities are to be performed at a particular time. Sequencing concerns the ordering in which the activities have to be performed. The allocation of scarce resources over time has been the subject of extensive research since the early days of operations researc...