Journal of Health Services Research & Policy -- Q&A
 
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Journal of Health Services Research & Policy

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Questions & Answers

The Questions & Answers section in the Journal was set up to identify and try to answer puzzles, especially methodological ones, in health services research and policy. For information, questions from previous issues are listed below.

Volume 12, Issue 3, p192

  • Does a citation rating tell you whether an article is useful?
  • Should we continue educating students who will become surgeons and physicians together?

    • Volume 12, Issue 2, p128

  • Does health care need to be integrated, either with itself or with anything else?
  • Should doctors be trained or serve an apprenticeship?

    • Volume 11, Issue 4, p256

  • Does health care need to be integrated, either with itself or with anything else?
  • Should doctors be trained or serve an apprenticeship?

    • Volume 11, Issue 3, p192

  • Should systematic reviews be seen as original research?

    • Volume 11, Issue 2, p128

  • Should doctors be trained separately?
  • Is care better in settings that do clinical research?

    • Volume 10, Issue 1, p64

  • Do censuses have a future role in health services planning?
  • Is it better for a journal not to have an impact factor than to have a low one?

    • Volume 9, Issue 4, p256

  • When should clinicians be simply told to do what they are paid to do?
  • Is there a practical test of the reliability and validity of conclusions based on qualitative research?

    • Volume 9, Issue 2, p126

  • Why bother with public health interventions if you can successfully intervene during ill-health?

    • Volume 9, Issue 1, p61

  • How long is an undue delay?
  • What is the lowest acceptable response rate for a questionnaire study (e.g. as part of a postal or telephone survey)?
  • What's the difference between an 'outcome' and an 'endpoint'?

    • Volume 8, Issue 4, p255

  • How should we decide what is part of a health intervention and what is part of its context, and does it matter?
  • What happens when prescription drugs are advertised to the general public?
  • Who manages best - professional managers or clinicians?

    • Volume 8, Issue 3, p191

  • Central or local control - which produces the best health care?
  • What do you need to make health care 'integrated'?
  • Is it realistic to expect a health service to reduce health inequalities?

    • Volume 8, Issue 2, p127

  • Can morale be measured?
  • What is wrong with cloning humans?
  • How realistic is 'realistic evaluation'?

    • Volume 8, Issue 1, p64

  • Are conferences a waste of money?
  • What's the point of trying to integrate health and social care?
  • Why is repeated structural change in health services seen as a bad thing?

    • Volume 7, Issue 4, p254

  • Does doing systematic reviews make you want to give up research?
  • Why do health providers never keep within their budgets?
  • What's wrong with spending more health care resources on younger people?

    • Volume 7, Issue 3, p192

  • What would a 'modern' health service look like?
  • Does publishing league tables influence organisational change?
  • Is there an inverse relationship between the academic respectability of research and its usefulness to the health service?

    • Volume 7, Issue 2, p127

  • What is the point of a primary-care-led health system?
  • Why don't policy makers take notice of research?
  • Is modernisation a cover for greater managerial control?

    • Volume 7, Issue 1, p68

  • Does the size of your private practice correspond with your performance in the public sector?
  • Why should health professionals do research?
  • Is it better to reward good health care services or devote resources to improving poor ones?

    • Volume 6, Issue 4, p255

  • Will paying health professionals more make them improve performance?
  • Are there any good examples of legislation that balance the interests of research and patients?
  • What is (or isn't) clinical governance?

    • Volume 6, Issue 3, p190

  • Do official inquiries ever make a difference?
  • Do guidelines infringe patients' rights?
  • Is sub-group analysis ever legitimate?

    • Volume 6, Issue 2, p127

  • Is 'globalisation' in health care simply a euphemism for 'Americanisation'?
  • Does hypothesis testing have a future?
  • Do print journals have a future?

    • Volume 6, Issue 1, p63

  • Multi-disciplinary research: is it any use, or is it just tokenism?
  • Is direct advertising of prescription drugs a good thing?
  • Should we have gender discrimination in medical schools to ensure that 50% of doctors are men?

    • Volume 5, Issue 4, p256

  • If the socio-economic gradient in health status were to reverse, what changes should we make to the health service?
  • How accountable can an individual practitioner be within a care organisation?
  • Can patients ever be consumers?

    • Volume 5, Issue 3, p195

  • What is the point of collecting figures if you can't interpret them?
  • Should managers and doctors have to go through regular recertification?
  • Should we have gender discrimination in medical schools to ensure that 50% of doctors are men?

    • Volume 5, Issue 2, p127

  • Should we demand that social, economic and welfare policies also be 'evidence-based'?
  • Is direct advertising of prescription drugs a good thing?
  • Do doctors make the best hospital managers?

    • Volume 5, Issue 1, p63

  • Why shouldn't you be able to sell your own organs?
  • How big should a hospital be?
  • Will the increase of women in medicine lead to a reduction in status and income?

    • Volume 4, Issue 4, p253

  • What is clinical effectiveness?
  • Why shouldn't people who can afford it pay for their own health care?
  • What is wrong with cloning humans?

    • Volume 4, Issue 3, p191

  • Where is the boundary between clinical need and social need for Viagra?
  • What is complementary medicine and why is it so under-evaluated?
  • What is clinical governance?

    • Volume 4, Issue 2, p127

  • Why do some aspects of health care (e.g. dentistry) get left out of national health/social insurance systems?
  • Is there any point in spending money on reducing waiting lists?
  • Do nurses need degrees?

    • Volume 3, Issue 4, p254

  • What is 'human factors engineeing' (cognitive ergonomics) and why is it essentail to the design of software, hardware and people-ware interventions in medicine?
  • Has involving consumers (patients) in research made any difference to what is researched and how?
  • Does the environment of a hospital affect recovery?

    • Volume 3, Issue 3, p191

  • Do focus groups provide all the answers?
  • Why are receiver operator characteristics curves (ROCs) so called?
  • If RCTs are so good for evidence-based medicine, why are purchasers beginning to say that trials are artificial and contrived and that they want 'real world' evidence of effectiveness?

    • Volume 3, Issue 2, p127

  • What are barriers to entry in health care markets?
  • What is benchmarking?
  • If Bayesian statistics are so good, why are graduates taught traditional methods?

    • Volume 3, Issue 1, p60

  • How does the misuse of the term 'the Hawthorne effect' affect the interpretation of research results?
  • Given the distributional nature of costing and resource utilisation, is it more appropriate to use median or mean descriptive statistics?
  • Glaser and Strauss suggest that the grounded theory approach to analysis could be used for quantitative data. How?

    • Volume 2, Issue 3, p194

  • The price of work within health services varies accoording to who does it (e.g. medical staff versus non-medical staff). What does this say about the value of such work?
  • What is the best way to adjust for co-morbidity or to balance randomization among frail persons aged 65 or over participating in a randomized controlled trial?
  • Can morale be measured?

    • Volume 2, Issue 2, p129

  • When standardizing for age, how does one decide to use direct or indirect methods?
  • Is there an agreed definition of professions allied to medicine?
  • Why do health economists not take transfer payments into account?

    • Volume 2, Issue 1, p60

  • What is the difference between equity and equality?
  • What is primary care?
  • Is 'evidence-based' medicine ageist?

    • Volume 1, Issue 4, p253

  • What is 'disease management'?
  • What are the criteria for selecting a 'gold standard' measure?
  • What is the difference between health status and health outcome?

    • Volume 1, Issue 3, p171

  • Why has performance related pay been abandoned in parts of the private sector but is being pursued in the British National Health Service?
  • How do you decide whether to use indirect or direct methods when standardizing for age?
  • What is the difference between odds ratios and relative risk estimates?

    • Volume 1, Issue 2, p118

  • What is community care?
  • Why does medical technology always increase expenditure?
  • Are international comparisons of health care expenditure inevitably meaningless?
  • Is it true that half of our health care expenditure is consumed in the last 6 months of our lives?

    • Volume 1, Issue 1, p55

  • Is there a standard definition of 'readmission' and, if so, what is the evidence for it?
  • How do we interpret changes in waiting list sizes over time when there is faster throughput of patients for technical reasons?
  • How do we know when we have adjusted sufficiently for case mix (for example, when comparing the performance of different hospitals)?
  • Is 'managed competition' a contradiction in terms?
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