It is estimated that as many as between 3 million and 6 million people in the UK experience some degree of urinary incontinence. There are several types of incontinence. Stress incontinence is one of the main trypes. It is caused by sphincter weakness and occurs when there is pressure on the abdomen created by sneezing, coughing, lifting, or straining. The second common type is urge incontinence, caused by bladder abnormalities leading to an irresistible urge to pass urine. The third main type is mixed incontinence which is a combination of stress and urge.

Treatments

Urinary…

Doctors' Risk Attitude

Risk attitude is known to vary substantially across individuals. Some individuals are very risk averse and tend to make safe choices (e.g. investing in a bond) whilst others are more risk seeking and are more comfortable with risky choices (e.g. investing in the stock market). Clinical decisions generally involve risks and the risk attitude of the doctor (and the patient) is therefore important. For example, women with a BRCA gene mutation are believed to have a higher risk of breast cancer. Treatment options include frequent cancer screening which is less invasive but associated with a higher…

Minimum unit pricing (MUP) for alcohol was introduced in Scotland in May 2018 as part of the Scottish Government’s strategy to reduce the health and social harms associated with alcohol misuse. The graph below shows that for a long time Scotland has had the highest alcohol-specific death rate in the UK. It also shows that this rate had been falling up to 2012 but progress has stalled.

Source: Office for National Statistics (2019). Alcohol-specific deaths in UK: registered in 2018. 

There is…

Pandemics require the whole community to act

The COVID-19 pandemic raises pressing questions about the way we think about the public health preferences of citizens. An effective response to this crisis relies on the cooperation of every member of the community, which is why it is important that health preference research focuses on citizens’ preferences towards communal goods and collective action.

This means that we need to think about how well the tools in our methodological toolbox are up to this task. Can economic preference evaluation methods shed light on people’s concerns about the well-being of others? Can they…

Deciding whether to refer a patient to an Intensive Care Unit (or Critical Care Unit) has always been a difficult clinical and ethical challenge. The limited number of ICU beds means that decisions often have to be made about who should be referred and who should not. Intensive care can have a negative impact on the patient’s quality of life. Treatment is invasive and distressing and, for those patients who do not survive to leave hospital or who survive with a quality of life they do not value, ICU treatment may have caused harm rather than provided benefit. Optimum treatment…