Waiting time distribution in public health care: empirics and theory.

Excessive waiting times for elective surgery have been a long-standing concern in many national healthcare systems in the OECD. How do the hospital admission patterns that generate waiting lists affect different patients? What are the hospitals characteristics that determine waiting times? By developing a model of healthcare provision and analysing empirically the entire waiting time distribution we attempt to shed some light on those issues. We first build a theoretical model that describes the optimal waiting time distribution for capacity constraint hospitals.

Identifying the impact of government targets on waiting times in the NHS.

Waiting times for elective surgery are a key issue for the NHS. The principal policy response in the English NHS has been to introduce maximum waiting time targets against which performance is measured and rewarded. The aim of this paper is to identify the effect of government targets on the distribution of waiting times in the NHS.

Public T cell receptor beta-chains are not advantaged during positive selection.

Studies of human and murine T cells have shown that public TCR beta-chain rearrangements can dominate the Ag-specific and naive repertoires of distinct individuals. We show that mouse T cells responding to the minor histocompatibility Ag HYDbSmcy share an invariant Vbeta8.2-Jbeta2.

Expansion of CD8+ cytotoxic T cells in vitro and in vivo using MHC class I tetramers.

Background: The expansion of cytotoxic CD8+ T lymphocytes (CTLs) which recognize peptide epitopes of tumour or viral origin has been a major aim of immunotherapy research for the past decade. Alongside the established dendritic cell-based methods, more recent approaches using recombinant MHC class I peptide complexes have been developed.

Methods: In this study we have explored the potential of a simplified system using soluble streptavidin-linked MHC class I tetramers to expand antigen-specific CTLs in vitro and in vivo.