This memorandum contains the replies received from the Department of Health to a series of questions tabled by the Select Committee, on a wide range of issues grouped under the headings of: expenditure; investment, including the private finance initiative (PFI); NHS Plan and reforms, including staffing, pay and contracts, treatment outside the NHS, and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE); breakdown of spending programme; activity, performance and efficiency; and departmental annual report.

Public expenditure on health and personal social Services 2007 : Memorandum received from the Department of Health containing replies to a written questionnaire from the Committee, written Evidence

This memorandum contains the replies received from the Department of Health to a series of questions tabled by the Select Committee, on a wide range of issues grouped under the headings of: current issues including NHS staffing; salaries and wages of non-NHS staff; retirement projections, dental and medical staff payscales; also included are; general expenditure issues; NHS resources and activity; personal social services resources and activity; capital expenditure and investment and questions on the departmental annual report

With new devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, this book provides a study of developments in the major areas of social policy and a full comparison between the four UK nations.

Dated May 2007. On cover: Departmental report. The health and personal social services programmes

Staffing costs account for 70 per cent of NHS funding and the effectiveness of its workforce in large part determines the overall effectiveness of the health service. Workforce planning is the key means for the NHS to understand and anticipate the impact of demographic, technological and policy trends on future service requirements. However, workforce planning in also a challenging and complex issue, in light of social and technological changes, as well as the lengthy timescale involved in training staff (at least three years for most health professions and up to twenty years for some senior doctors). The Committee's report examines the effectiveness of current workforce planning activities, including clinical and managerial staff, particularly in the light of reported deficits in NHS organisations, and how it should be done in the future, including the following issues: workforce developments since 1999, the impact of the European Work Time Directive and increasing international competition for staff, retention and recruitment issues, examples of good practice, how to ensure flexibility in system arrangements, and whether planning should be centralised or decentralised.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Three million workers delivered health and social care in the UK in 2019, accounting for a tenth of the workforce. These frontline workers were the nurses, doctors, adult care workers, and Allied Health Professions that worked in our hospitals, GP practices, and care homes. Spending on this workforce is the largest single item of cost on health and social care, with fifty percent of the current spend of a typical UK hospital going on its frontline workforce. The Economics of the UK Health and Social Care Labour Market details the size, occupational composition, geographical coverage, and growth of this workforce. Here, Robert Elliott explains why people work in frontline care and what drives the demand for these workers, details the heavy dependence of UK health and social care on foreign trained workers and explores its consequences, and considers how the labour market for frontline workers operates, how these workers' pay is set, and what has happened to it in recent years. Elliott explores the reasons for the acute shortage of some key frontline occupations and explains why economic theory is essential to understanding the way this labour market works and to constructing coherent and effective policy. Finally, the book proposes policies to improve the efficiency of this market and to resolve the problems that currently plague it.

The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.