Pompeii Skeletons and Ancient Health Conditions

Am stuck in the office working on something so cannot get to the BBC documentary about Pompeii but the article is really interesting. The well-preserved skeletons found hiding in a basement to escape the volcano include several middle-aged and elderly people and people taller, on average, than the residents of modern Naples, according to the BBC report. There are obvious limitations in looking at skeletal remains to recover ancient health conditions and social structures but what a really interesting enterprise to attempt.

Health Research Policy and Systems: Issue on Evidence and Policy

Thanks to Nicola for sending on a useful link to a recent special issue on evidence-based healthcare policy:

Contents of Volume 7 Suppl 1

SUPPORT Tools for evidence-informed health Policymaking (STP) 

Guides

Edited by Andy Oxman and Stephen Hanney

This series of articles was prepared as part of the SUPPORT project, which was supported by the European Commission’s 6th Framework INCO programme, contract 031939. The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, and the Milbank Memorial Fund funded a peer review meeting where an earlier version of the series was discussed. The Canada Research Chairs Program provides salary support to John Lavis, who has authored several articles in this series, in his role as Chair Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Transfer and Exchange. None of the funders had a role in drafting, revising or approving the content of this series.

This article is the Introduction to a series written for people responsible for making decisions about health policies and programmes and for those who support these decision makers. Knowing how to find and use research evidence can help policymakers and those who support them to do their jobs better and more efficiently. Each article in this series presents a proposed tool that can be used by those involved in finding and using research evidence to support evidence informed health policymaking. The series addresses four broad areas: 1. Supporting evidenceinformed policymaking 2. Identifying needs for research evidence in relation to three steps in policymaking processes, namely problem clarification, options framing, and implementation planning 3. Finding and assessing both systematic reviews and other types of evidence to inform these steps, and 4. Going from research evidence to decisions. Each article begins with between one and three typical scenarios relating to the topic. These scenarios are designed to help readers decide on the level of detail relevant to them when applying the tools described. Most articles in this series are structured using a set of questions that guide readers through the proposed tools and show how to undertake activities to support evidence-informed policymaking efficiently and effectively. These activities include, for example, using research evidence to clarify problems, assessing the applicability of the findings of a systematic review about the effects of options selected to address problems, organising and using policy dialogues to support evidence-informed policymaking, and planning policy monitoring and evaluation. In several articles, the set of questions presented offers more general guidance on how to support evidence-informed policymaking. Additional information resources are listed and described in every article. The evaluation of ways to support evidence-informed health policymaking is a developing field and feedback about how to improve the series is welcome.

"MIT World": Merton Lecture on Derivatives

There will be a time “beyond crisis,” asserts Robert C. Merton (in this video lecture). "He delves into the dense science of derivatives -- a field he has fundamentally shaped -- to explain how the vast global economic collapse has come about, and how financial innovations at the heart of the collapse could also be tools for reconstruction."

A whole range of "MIT World" videos are available to browse through here. There is one by Drazen Prelec on Neuroeconomics, one by Jonathan Gruber on Healthcare, and one by Bill Gates on Innovation.

Costs of Waiting

Using data from the American Time Use Survey, Alan Krueger puts a valuation on time lost due to waiting around - a collective time of 847 million hours. When he includes all time spent, the economic time valuation stretches to an aggregate 240 billion dollars. Assigning dollar values to time spent in non-market activities is an issue with a lot of nuances but this is something we should look at over here. As krueger points out, just focusing on monetary cost efficiency can be severely distorting if we dont take these non-priced factors into account

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/a-hidden-cost-of-health-care-patient-time/