Teaser: How much should we spend on people with frailty versus people with mental health problems? Unless we can answer questions like this, we cannot have high value universal healthcare. Alain Enthoven, is mistakenly blamed for suggesting to Margaret Thatcher that the NHS should introduce the purchaser provider split- actually his Nuffield Trust paper advocated the development of accountable care organisations. However, this book is about the work he and colleagues did on creating programme budgets in the Department of Defense (sic) in the US. Originally published in 1971 this is a book of enduring value and lasting relevance. Enthoven details the application, history, and controversies surrounding the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System.

Teaser: Making decisions, especially where there are competing priorities, is complex and sometimes impossible. Arrow describes two ways in which decisions can be made in democratic capitalist countries, markets and politics. Understanding these options are critical to anyone in a position to influence resource use in healthcare...

Teaser: This book really is obligatory reading for anyone who influences the use of resources in healthcare and is interested in quality. Avedis Donabedian's name is synonymous with quality of health care. He unravelled the mystery behind the concept by defining it in clear operational terms and provided detailed blueprints for both its measurement (known as quality assessment) and its improvement (known as quality assurance). Many before him claimed that quality couldn't be defined in concrete objective terms. He demonstrated that quality is an attribute of a system which he called structure, a set of organised activities which he called process, and an outcome which results from both.

Teaser: The people we serve would expect resources to be used fairly and reasonably. In this book, Daniels and Sabin outline that we lack consensus on principles for allocating medical resources, and in the absence of such a consensus we must develop and rely on a fair decision-making process for setting limits on health care so we can use resources more fairly.

Teaser: Anybody leading a public service organisation, a hospital, a clinic, a healthcare payer, should understand their role in providing public value. This great book by Mark Moore summarises what value means within the public sector, and the different perspectives that need to be taken.

Teaser: The current fashion is for targeting interventions towards those at higher risk. But this is often at the expense of interventions that are targeted at a whole population. Which is best? The population strategy of prevention refers to prevention activities that target a whole population regardless of variation in individuals' risk status, whereas a high-risk strategy targets individuals identified as having elevated risk for some adverse health outcome (e.g. thorough screening). In this classic book by Geoffrey Rose, the pros and cons of each approach are discussed.

Teaser: Friedman’s great addition to management thinking was that we need to stop focussing on doing a lot of activity productively and start to focus on outcomes. More importantly, hold ourselves accountable for doing so, Outcomes Based Accountability (OBA) can be used to improve the quality of life in communities, cities, counties, states and nations, including everything from the well-being of children to the creation of a sustainable environment. It is an approach that supports value-based population health.

Teaser: Why have costs risen in healthcare? How can we improve the value of care? In Designing Care, Harvard Business School professor and doctor Richard Bohmer explains that health-care professionals are tasked with providing two very different types of care - sequential and iterative.  To reduce costs and manage care effectively, sequential and iterative care situations require different management systems. Bohmer reveals how health-care providers can successfully manage both modes.

Fjeldstad, Ø. D., Johnson, J. K., Margolis, P. A., Seid, M., Höglund, P., & Batalden, P. B. (Accepted/In press). Networked health care: Rethinking value creation in learning health care systems. Learning Health Systems, [e10212].

https://doi.org/10.1002/lrh2.10212

How does participating in a deliberative citizens panel on healthcare priority setting influence the views of participants?

Reckers-Droog V et al (2020) et al./Health Policy 124143–151

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2019.11.011