The title it a bit obscure, but makes the distinction between people who pay for medicines and those who prescribe them. There is a pathway for new medicines into markets, and increasingly it is not by marketing to doctors. The pharmaceutical industry to a great extent still sells medicines like the Avon sales person, [...]
The lost of my trilogy picks up on medicines again. In the US, not taking medicines correctly is thought to be the fourth leading cause of death – could this be true? WHO data on mortality captures medicines use in a variety of categories. I ran the data on the categories concerned with medicines-related harm [...]
Continuing with my thoughts today on excess costs (last post was on medicines waste), I thought I think about excess hospitalisation, another type of waste. Excess risk of hospitalisation is calculated as the difference between observed hospitalisation (for a condition) and expected population rates. What are the determinants of excess hospitalisation? Excess hospitalisation can be [...]
In these days of trying to better understand the determinants of rising healthcare expenditure, it is productive to look in the waste bin, to see what is being thrown away. Let’s look in the waste bin and see what medicines we find. Medicines waste is medicines given to patients that they do not take. But [...]
Just about every country has identified life sciences in some form or other as a priority for academic and commercial development. But what will characterise the countries that may in the end prevail? The research community needs a high degree of autonomy. The European University Association released an interesting study, University Autonomy in Europe II: [...]
There is a clutch of small states within the European Union. There are many more small states outside the EU. Much can be learned from them, as at least within the EU, some seem more robustly managed and economic productive than their larger debt-laden counterparts. Healthcare systems are often seen as requiring some degree of [...]
The Academic Health Science Centre undertakes three important missions: they treat patients they conduct research they teach the next generation of clinicians The AHSC model, as a structured and integrated organisational form, is most developed in the US, Canada, Netherlands, UK, Sweden and a few others, and emergent in other countries. They are a distinct [...]
The Russian “United Art Rating” is an artist rating service of the Artist Trade Union of Russia and which uses the following scale for rating artists (nationally and internationally) [source here] 1 – an artist of world fame, tested with time (for more than a century). 1A – a world famous artist. 1B – a [...]
One of the real issues facing EU members, particularly those that are having trouble paying their healthcare bills from suppliers, is the way that medicines are priced. The issue of drug pricing is likely to become even more important internationally as the UK pricing system will move to ‘value-based pricing’ in a year when the [...]
Euractiv is reporting some concerns that there will be a decrease in research spending in the EU. The article is here. According to the survey that triggered the anxiety, some 93% of those surveyed said that “investing in innovation is one of the best ways to create jobs in Europe.” This is absolutely right! However, [...]
A recently released report from the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies has produced a retrospective on what over 40 European countries did in response to the financial crisis, triggered in 2007. The report “Health policy responses to the financial crisis in Europe” (by Mladovsky, Srivastava, Cylus, Karanikolos, Evetovits, Thomson, McKee) is here. The [...]
The UK’s Department of Health and UK Trade and Investment are, once again, exploring how to commercialise the NHS ‘brand’ overseas. Drawing examples from where some highly recognisable UK hospitals have set up, notably in the Middle East (Moorfields, Great Ormond Street) the spectre of a steady income stream coming into the NHS from these [...]
In Canada, healthcare in British Columbia is slowly coming apart because of the existence of a private health clinic. This link is to a legal foundation that takes on legal cases such as this and provides a reasonable overview of the situation: LINK In Canada there is continuing debate whether the Canada Health Act‘s language [...]
There have been quite a few cases of late of regulatory failure by the Care Quality Commission [CQC] in the UK. How can regulatory performance be monitored and improved? The first thing to realise is that regulators are monopoly suppliers of regulation; that means, that if they don’t do a good job, the regulated don’t [...]
Euractiv has reported on Commissioner Dalli’s comments that the Euro-zone crisis should not turn into a public health crisis. He added: “difficult times can indeed provide an incentive to think creatively and push forward in-depth reforms and contain costs, while building modern, responsive, and sustainable health systems fit for the future.” I agree, yet despair. [...]