A middle way for rationing healthcare resources

Can clinical ethics committees be legitimate actors in bedside rationing?

Background

Rationing and allocation decisions at the clinical level – bedside rationing – entail complex dilemmas that clinicians and managers often find difficult to handle. There is a lack of mechanisms and aids for promoting fair decisions, especially in hard cases. Reports indicate that clinical ethics committees (CECs) sometimes handle cases that involve bedside rationing dilemmas. Can CECs have a legitimate role to play in bedside rationing?

Main text

Aided by two frameworks for legitimate priority setting, we discuss how CECs can contribute to enhanced epistemic, procedural and political legitimacy in bedside rationing decisions. Drawing on previous work we present brief case vignettes and outline several potential roles that CECs may play, and then discuss whether these might contribute to rationing decisions becoming legitimate. In the process, key prerequisites for such legitimacy are identified. Legitimacy places demands on aspects such as the CEC’s deliberation process, the involvement of stakeholders, transparency of process, the opportunity to appeal decisions, and the competence of CEC members. On these conditions, CECs can help strengthen the legitimacy of some of the rationing decisions clinicians and managers have to make.

Conclusions

On specified conditions, CECs can have a well-justified advisory role to play in order to enhance the legitimacy of bedside rationing decisions.

'Cosmetic boob jobs' or evidence-based breast surgery: an interpretive policy analysis of the rationing of 'low value' treatments in the English National Health Service

Background

In England the National Health Service (NHS) is not allowed to impose ‘blanket bans’ on treatments, but local commissioners produce lists of ‘low value’ procedures that they will normally not fund. Breast surgery is one example. However, evidence suggests that some breast surgery is clinically effective, with significant health gain. National guidelines indicate the circumstances under which breast surgery should be made available on the NHS, but there is widespread variation in their implementation.

The purpose of this study was to explore the work practices of ‘individual funding request’ (IFR) panels, as they considered ‘one-off’ funding requests for breast surgery; examine how the notion of ‘value’ is dialogically constructed, and how decisions about who is deserving of NHS funding and who is not are accomplished in practice.

Methods

We undertook ethnographic exploration of three IFR panels. We extracted all (22) breast surgery cases considered by these panels from our data set and progressively focused on three case discussions, one from each panel, covering the three main breast procedures.

We undertook a microanalysis of the talk and texts arising from these cases, within a conceptual framework of interpretive policy analysis.

Results

Through an exploration of the symbolic artefacts (language, objects and acts) that are significant carriers of policy meaning, we identified the ways in which IFR panels create their own ‘interpretive communities’, within which deliberations about the funding of breast surgery are differently framed, and local decisions come to be justified. In particular, we demonstrated how each decision was contingent on [a] the evaluative accent given to certain words, [b] the work that documentary objects achieve in foregrounding particular concerns, and [c] the act of categorising. Meaning was constructed dialogically through local interaction and broader socio-cultural discourses about breasts and ‘cosmetic’ surgery.

Conclusion

Despite the appeal of calls to tackle ‘unwarranted variation’ in access to low priority treatments by ensuring uniformity of local guidelines and policies, our findings suggest that ultimately, given the contingent nature of practice, this is likely to remain an illusory policy goal. Our findings challenge the scientistic thinking underpinning mainstream health policy discourse.

Economic evaluation and the Jordan Rational Drug List: an exploratory study of national-level priority setting

OBJECTIVES

To explore the extent of and barriers to the use of economic evaluation in compiling the Jordan Rational Drug List in the health care system of Jordan.

METHODS

The research reported in this article involved a case study of the Jordan Rational Drug List. Data collection methods included semi-structured interviews with decision makers and analysis of secondary documentary sources. The case study was supplemented by additional interviews with a small number of Jordanian academics involved in the production of economic evaluation.

RESULTS

The research found that there was no formal requirement for cost-effectiveness information submitted as part of the decision-making process for the inclusion of new technologies on the Jordan Rational Drug List. Both decision makers and academics suggested that economic evidence was not influential in formulary decisions. This is unusual for national formulary bodies. The study identified a number of barriers that prevent substantive and routine use of economic evaluation. While some of these echo findings of previous studies, others-notably the extent to which the sectional interests of clinical groups and commercial (pharmaceutical) industry exert undue influence over decision making-more obviously result from the specific Jordanian context.

CONCLUSIONS

Economic evaluation was not found to be influential in the Jordan Rational Drug List. Recommendations for improvement include enhancing capacity in relation to generating, accessing, and/or applying health economic analysis to priority setting decisions. There is a further need to incentivize the use of economic evaluation, and this requires that organizational and structural impediments be removed.

Realizing and allocating savings from improving health care quality and efficiency

International efforts to increase the quality and efficiency of health care services may be creating financial savings that can be used to improve population health. This article examines evidence that such savings (ie, a quality/efficiency or value dividend) are accruing and how they have been allocated and assesses the prospects for reallocating future savings to improve population health. Savings have resulted mainly from reducing the number of inappropriate or harmful interventions, managing care of people with chronic disease more effectively, and implementing health information technology. Savings to date have accrued to the revenues of public and private collective purchasers of care and large provider organizations, but none seem to have been reallocated to address other determinants of health. Furthermore, improved quality sometimes increases spending.

Priority setting in health care: on the relation between reasonable choices on the micro-level and the macro-level

There has been much discussion about how to obtain legitimacy at macro-level priority setting in health care by use of fair procedures, but how should we consider priority setting by individual clinicians or health workers at the micro-level? Despite the fact that just health care totally hinges upon their decisions, surprisingly little attention seems being paid to the legitimacy of these decisions. This paper addresses the following question: what are the conditions that have to be met in order to ensure that individual claims on health care are well aligned with an overall concept of just health care? Drawing upon a distinction between individual and aggregated needs, I argue that even though we assume the legitimacy of macro-level guidelines, this legitimacy is not directly transferable to decisions at micro-level simply by adherence to the guidelines' recommendation. Further, I argue that individual claims are subject to the formal principle of equality and the demands of vertical and horizontal equity in a way that gives context- and patient-related equity concerns precedence over equity concerns captured at the macro-level. I conclude that if we aim to achieve just health care, we need to develop a complementary framework for legitimising individual judgment of patients' claims on health care resources. Moreover, I suggest the basic structure of such a framework.

Complexity and reflexivity: two important issues for economic evaluation in health care

Economic evaluations are analytic techniques to assess the relative costs and consequences of health care programmes and technologies. Their role is to provide rigorous data to inform the health care decision-making process. Economic evaluation may oversimplify complex health care decisions. These analyses often ignore important health consequences, contextual elements, relationships or other relevant modifying factors, which might not be appropriate in a multi-objective, multi-stakeholder issue. One solution would be to develop a new paradigm based on the issues of perspective and context. Complexity theory may provide a useful conceptual framework for economic evaluation in health care. Complexity thinking develops an awareness of issues including uncertainty, contextual issues, multiple perspectives, broader societal involvement, and transdisciplinarity. This points the economic evaluation field towards an accountability and epistemology based on pluralism and uncertainty, requiring new forms of lay-expert engagement and roles of lay knowledge into decision-making processes. This highlights the issue of reflexivity in economic evaluation in health care. A reflexive approach would allow economic evaluators to analyze how objective structures and subjective elements influence their practices. In return, this would point increase the integrity and reliability of economic evaluations. Reflexivity provides opportunities for critically thinking about the organization and activities of the intellectual field, and perhaps the potential of moving in new, creative directions. This paper argues for economic evaluators to have a less positivist attitude towards what is useful knowledge, and to use more imagination about the data and methodologies they use.