Dental Health Personnel Planning: a Review of the Literature

Dental personnel planning is important in formulating policy in dental education, dental public health programs, and dental care delivery systems. The purpose of this literature review is to illustrate the use of dentist-to-population ratios, need-based models, and demand-based models in the determination of appropriate supply of dental personnel. A historical perspective is provided that demonstrates how political manipulation and subjectivity have characterized the use of these models by organized dentistry, the federal government, and others. The lack of pertinent data and the inability to predict economic, social, political, and epidemiologic trends weaken the applicability of each model in determining future personnel levels. Considering the long-term consequences of the use of each model in personnel planning, caution is urged in using any of the presently available models.     

Something old,something new,something borrowed,something blue: a framework for the marriage of health econometrics and cost-effectiveness analysis

Economic evaluation is often seen as a branch of health economics divorced from mainstream econometric techniques. Instead, it is perceived as relying on statistical methods for clinical trials. Furthermore, the statistic of interest in cost-effectiveness analysis, the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio is not amenable to regression-based methods, hence the traditional reliance on comparing aggregate measures across the arms of a clinical trial. In this paper, we explore the potential for health economists undertaking cost-effectiveness analysis to exploit the plethora of established econometric techniques through the use of the net-benefit framework - a recently suggested reformulation of the cost-effectiveness problem that avoids the reliance on cost-effectiveness ratios and their associated statistical problems. This allows the formulation of the cost-effectiveness problem within a standard regression type framework. We provide an example with empirical data to illustrate how a regression type framework can enhance the net-benefit method. We go on to suggest that practical advantages of the net-benefit regression approach include being able to use established econometric techniques, adjust for imperfect randomisation, and identify important subgroups in order to estimate the marginal cost-effectiveness of an intervention.     

中国卫生总费用历史回顾和发展预测

为了配合国务院有关部门开展中国卫生筹资发展研究,中国卫生总费用核算小组组织人力进行《中国卫生总费用历史回顾和发展预测》。我们的研究工作包括以下４个部分：１．对历史上积累的数据按照目前的计算口径作出调整和修匀;２．利用历史数据从卫生服务需求和卫生筹资提供能力两个角度进行时间序列影响因素分析;３．利用从各方面收集到的数据和科学判断,按照供求两组时间序列经济模型对１９９９￣２００２年和２０１０年卫生总费