Interventions in frailty care and enhancing independence
Shibley Rahman in Living with frailty, 2018
Governments have recently displayed an increasing interest in utilising behavioural scientific evidence when designing public policy (European Commission, 2016). Health policy is defined by the World Health Organization as ‘decisions, plans, and actions that are undertaken to achieve specific health care goals within a society’.2 Policies are a means for generating and/or supporting the implementation of health behaviour change interventions, which are a set of activities designed to bring about change; thus, policies are crucial for the interventions’ implementation and outcomes (Seppälä et al., 2017). Given the sheer diversity of singular and multifaceted frailty interventions, not all of them have been compared in head-to-head studies. Network meta-analyses provide an approach to simultaneous consideration of the relative effectiveness of multiple treatment alternatives (Negm et al., 2017).
Relative Survival Analysis
Atanu Bhattacharjee in Bayesian Approaches in Oncology Using R and OpenBUGS, 2020
Relative survival analysis can help us to provide information that is difficult to address by conventional analysis. It is really useful to adopt a conventional analysis of a better therapeutic effect comparison. We illustrate the application through OpenBUG software. It is performed as a Bayesian counterpart. The methodology of relative survival by the multiplicative and additive model is well-elaborated [49]. The application of relative survival at an individual level is also documented [50]. The application of relative survival is very limited only on cancer have low survival rates. A good explanation about relative and net survival is well-documented [45]. Cause-specific survival can be used toward median duration survival estimates. However, it is applicable in relative survival. The hazard function estimates are developed through predictive scoring. The treatment effect can be compared through different age interval by piecewise hazard. It is also applicable in health policy implementation. This chapter provides the importance of relative survival, and piecewise estimates of hazard function are feasible to use to develop prediction score as well. It will provide us with another dimension about the establishment of therapeutic effect. It may be important toward health policy decision. This work will help to understand the hazard function at a different time point interval.
Public policies in building a healthy community
Ben Y.F. Fong, Martin C.S. Wong in The Routledge Handbook of Public Health and the Community, 2021
Healthy communities are a sphere of potential convergence for stakeholders of health (Cushing & van Vliet, 2018). Hancock (1993) identified six characteristics of a healthy community, including environmental sustainability, ecological sustainability, livability, community friendliness, social equity and economic affluence. To translate these attributes into action, education and governance are the major drivers of the change process. The strategic planning process of building a healthy community is based on the perceptions of health of community members and how they drive out poor health in the community (Dakubo, 2010). How much a community can successfully accomplish is severely affected by political and economic barriers (Fitzgerald & Caro, 2014). In this regard, the government, community members and other stakeholders shall formulate, implement and evaluate health policy to foster healthy communities. Stakeholders of community health need to understand age-friendly communities, intergenerational communities, community programmes and interventions, as well as the role of built environment in building a healthy community.
The Cost of Compassion: Resource Allocation and Disorders of Consciousness
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2021
Why should health policy focus on promoting opportunity, rather than promoting patient welfare? A possible justification is grounded in an argument about the proper aims of social policy more generally. One might argue that the aim of social policy should be to preserve and enlarge the range of possibilities open to individuals to pursue their own conception of the good life, while remaining as neutral as possible about what the good life is (Hausman 2015). Social policy should facilitate opportunities for citizens, not satisfy their preferences. Accordingly, health policy should be concerned with the ways in which health states impact the range of opportunities for worthwhile activities available to individuals, rather than the impact of a particular health state on individual well-being. For example, disabilities such as paraplegia, blindness, and deafness limit the range of opportunities open to individuals, but may have various effects on their well-being. Blindness denies me the opportunity to drive a car, but in an environment with accessible transit, I may not be any worse off than if I was not blind. Treatment to prevent blindness has value from a policy perspective insofar as it expands the range of opportunities available to individuals, and not as a result of its impact on their well-being.
Using Decision Curve Analysis to Evaluate Common Strategies for Myopia Screening in School-Aged Children
Published in Ophthalmic Epidemiology, 2019
Senlin Lin, Yingyan Ma, Xiangui He, Jianfeng Zhu, Haidong Zou
Decision curve analysis (DCA) is a newly developed method (first published in 2006) that evaluates screening and diagnostic techniques.19 DCA not only considers the performance of the diagnostic tests under ideal conditions but also analyzes real-world conditions, such as the prevalence for a given disease, the benefits of correct treatment, the harm of misdiagnosis, and the costs of the diagnostic test.20 The calculation and comparison of the net benefit, or the sum of the benefit minus the harm, are the main outcomes of DCA.20 The present study used DCA to evaluate different strategies for screening myopia. This included NCAR, UCVA, a combination of NCAR and UCVA, and cycloplegic auto-refraction. By calculating their net benefits of application in the real world, the strategies for myopia screening in school-aged children could be compared. This information will be useful for guiding public health policy. Additional analyses were performed to evaluate DCA for detecting early myopia.
An assessment of the Swedish health system’s efficiency during the Covid-19 pandemic
Published in International Journal of Healthcare Management, 2023
Almas Heshmati, Mike Tsionas, Masoomeh Rashidghalam
The public health policy played a significant role in managing the pandemic. The liberal approach followed in public restrictions, high level of individual responsibility, the vaccination program, attaining herd immunity, and removing the restrictions helped the country return to normal. However, there was lack of satisfaction among the stakeholders about Sweden’s Covid-19 policy. The crisis management strategy involved the participation of political parties, national health agencies, and scientists with different weights and accounts for risk factors and errors in the causes and effects of selected policies. The approach from an economics perspective should follow a practiced political economy approach considering broader inclusive participation in decision making. As earlier studies have shown, the government’s active lockdown policies and lower population movements contributed to a decrease in new daily cases. Dynamic and adaptive government interventions and improved public awareness could have contributed to slowing the virus from spreading. Proactive learning by doing is needed to manage this unproductive crisis.
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