Rationale and design of the intravenous iron for treatment of anemia before cardiac surgery trial.

Background Approximately 20% to 30% of patients awaiting cardiac surgery are anemic. Anemia increases the likelihood of requiring a red cell transfusion and is associated with increased complications, intensive care, and hospital stay following surgery. Iron deficiency is the commonest cause of anemia and preoperative intravenous (IV) iron therapy thus may improve anemia and therefore patient outcome following cardiac surgery.

Healthcare Funding Decisions and Real-World Benefits: Reducing Bias by Matching Untreated Patients.

Governments and health insurers often make funding decisions based on health gains from randomised controlled trials. These decisions are inherently uncertain because health gains in trials may not translate to practice owing to differences in the population, treatment use and setting. Post-market analysis of real-world data can provide additional evidence but estimates from standard matching methods may be biased when unobserved characteristics explain whether a patient is treated and their outcomes.

Revealed and Stated Preferences of Decision Makers for Priority Setting in Health Technology Assessment: A Systematic Review.

Background: There is much interest from stakeholders in understanding how health technology assessment (HTA) committees make national funding decisions for health technologies. A growing literature has analysed past decisions by committees (revealed preference, RP studies) and hypothetical decisions by committee members (stated preference, SP studies) to identify factors influencing decisions and assess their importance.

Objectives: A systematic review of the literature was undertaken to provide insight into committee preferences for these factors (after controlling for other factors) and the methods used to elicit them.

6-PACK programme to decrease fall injuries in acute hospitals: cluster randomised controlled trial.

Objective: To evaluate the effect of the 6-PACK programme on falls and fall injuries in acute wards.

Design: Cluster randomised controlled trial.

Setting: Six Australian hospitals.

The extra resource burden of in-hospital falls: a cost of falls study.

Objective: To quantify the additional hospital length of stay (LOS) and costs associated with in-hospital falls and fall injuries in acute hospitals in Australia.

Design, Setting And Participants: A multisite prospective cohort study conducted during 2011-2013 in the control wards of a falls prevention trial (6-PACK). The trial included all admissions to 12 acute medical and surgical wards of six Australian hospitals.