Reframing professional boundaries in healthcare: a systematic review of facilitators and barriers to task reallocation from the domain of medicine to the nursing domain.

Aim: To explore the main facilitators and barriers to task reallocation.

Background: One of the innovative approaches to dealing with the anticipated shortage of physicians is to reallocate tasks from the professional domain of medicine to the nursing domain. Various (cost-)effectiveness studies demonstrate that nurse practitioners can deliver as high quality care as physicians and can achieve as good outcomes.

Finding legitimacy for the role of budget impact in drug reimbursement decisions.

Objectives: Research has shown that effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and severity of illness each play a role in drug reimbursement decisions. However, the role of budget impact in such decisions is less obvious. Policy makers almost always demand a budget impact estimate yet seem reluctant to formally include budget impact as a rationing criterion.

Inequalities in oncology care: Economic consequences of high cost drugs.

The expenditures for hospital drugs are continuously increasing, and grow much faster than the global hospital budgets do. This explosive growth is caused mainly by a few so-called 'expensive drugs' of which the oncolytics form the main part. The global budgets should stimulate more effective provision of care ('technical efficiency'), however the room for technical efficiency is decreasing.