Rights and Queues: On Distributive Contests in the Modern State

Two legal concepts have become fundamental to questions of resource allocation in the modern state: rights and queues. As rights are increasingly recognized in areas such as housing, health care, or immigration law, so too are queues used to administer access to the goods, services, or opportunities that realize such rights, especially in conditions of scarcity. This Article is the first to analyze the concept of queues (or temporal waiting lines or lists) and their ambivalent, interdependent relation with rights. After showing the conceptual tension between rights and queues, the Article argues that queues and “queue talk” present a unique challenge to rights and “rights talk.” In exploring the currency of rights and queues in both political and legal terms, the Article illustrates how participants discuss and contest the right to housing in South Africa, the right to health care in Canada, and the right to asylum in Australia. It argues that, despite its appearance in very different ideological and institutional settings, the political discourse of “queues” and especially “queue jumping” commonly invokes misleading distinctions between corruption and order, markets and bureaucracies, and governments and courts. Moreover, queue talk obscures the first-order questions on which resource allocations in housing, health care, or immigration contexts must rely. By bringing much-needed complexity to the concept of “queues,” the Article explores ways in which general principles of allocative fairness may be both open to contestation and yet supportive of basic claims of rights

Private health care as a supplement to a public health system with waiting time for treatment

In this article the authors Michael Hoel and Erik Magnus Sæther consider an economy where most of the health care is publicly provided, and where there is waiting time for several types of treatments. Private health care without waiting time is an option for the patients in the public health queue. This article shows the effects of a tax (positive or negative) on private health care, and derives the socially optimal tax/subsidy. Finally, a discussion of how the size of the tax might affect the political support for a high quality public health system is provided.Private health care; public health care; health queues

A Priority-based Fair Queuing (PFQ) Model for Wireless Healthcare System

Healthcare is a very active research area, primarily due to the increase in the elderly population that leads to increasing number of emergency situations that require urgent actions. In recent years some of wireless networked medical devices were equipped with different sensors to measure and report on vital signs of patient remotely. The most important sensors are Heart Beat Rate (ECG), Pressure and Glucose sensors. However, the strict requirements and real-time nature of medical applications dictate the extreme importance and need for appropriate Quality of Service (QoS), fast and accurate delivery of a patient’s measurements in reliable e-Health ecosystem. As the elderly age and older adult population is increasing (65 years and above) due to the advancement in medicine and medical care in the last two decades; high QoS and reliable e-health ecosystem has become a major challenge in Healthcare especially for patients who require continuous monitoring and attention. Nevertheless, predictions have indicated that elderly population will be approximately 2 billion in developing countries by 2050 where availability of medical staff shall be unable to cope with this growth and emergency cases that need immediate intervention. On the other side, limitations in communication networks capacity, congestions and the humongous increase of devices, applications and IOT using the available communication networks add extra layer of challenges on E-health ecosystem such as time constraints, quality of measurements and signals reaching healthcare centres. Hence this research has tackled the delay and jitter parameters in E-health M2M wireless communication and succeeded in reducing them in comparison to current available models. The novelty of this research has succeeded in developing a new Priority Queuing model ‘’Priority Based-Fair Queuing’’ (PFQ) where a new priority level and concept of ‘’Patient’s Health Record’’ (PHR) has been developed and integrated with the Priority Parameters (PP) values of each sensor to add a second level of priority. The results and data analysis performed on the PFQ model under different scenarios simulating real M2M E-health environment have revealed that the PFQ has outperformed the results obtained from simulating the widely used current models such as First in First Out (FIFO) and Weight Fair Queuing (WFQ). PFQ model has improved transmission of ECG sensor data by decreasing delay and jitter in emergency cases by 83.32% and 75.88% respectively in comparison to FIFO and 46.65% and 60.13% with respect to WFQ model. Similarly, in pressure sensor the improvements were 82.41% and 71.5% and 68.43% and 73.36% in comparison to FIFO and WFQ respectively. Data transmission were also improved in the Glucose sensor by 80.85% and 64.7% and 92.1% and 83.17% in comparison to FIFO and WFQ respectively. However, non-emergency cases data transmission using PFQ model was negatively impacted and scored higher rates than FIFO and WFQ since PFQ tends to give higher priority to emergency cases. Thus, a derivative from the PFQ model has been developed to create a new version namely “Priority Based-Fair Queuing-Tolerated Delay” (PFQ-TD) to balance the data transmission between emergency and non-emergency cases where tolerated delay in emergency cases has been considered. PFQ-TD has succeeded in balancing fairly this issue and reducing the total average delay and jitter of emergency and non-emergency cases in all sensors and keep them within the acceptable allowable standards. PFQ-TD has improved the overall average delay and jitter in emergency and non-emergency cases among all sensors by 41% and 84% respectively in comparison to PFQ model

The health queuing game

This paper studies agent-to-agent games in competition for a free public resource. The resource is not evidently scarce, scarcity may, however, be the equilibrium outcome. The agents' attributes may di er as well as quality parameters between di erent public resources. The examples are taken from the health sector. Based on simple two-player simultaneous games of complete information, results regarding agent equilibrium quality choices are derived. Most notably, Nash equilibria of the type: very ill patients choose low quality hospitals (denoted adverse patient allocation in the paper) are demonstrated. Furthermore, it is argued that a situation characterized by patients with relatively mild diseases but large patient variability (big di erences between patients regarding the given disease) and a health system with medium competition are prime candidates for Nash equilibria characterized by such Adverse patient allocation e ects

Using queuing theory to analyse completion times in accident and emergency departments in the light of the government 4-hour target

This paper uses a queuing model to evaluate completion times in accident and emergency (A&E) departments in the light of the Government target of completing and discharging 98% of patients inside 4 hours. It illustrates how flows though an A&E can be very accurately represented as a queuing process, how the outputs of a queuing model can be used to visualise and interpret the 4-hour hours Government target in a simple way and how queuing models can be used to assess the practical achievability of A&E targets in the future. The paper finds that A&E targets have resulted in significant improvements in completion times and thus deal with a major source of complaint by users of the National Health Service. It finds that whilst some of this improvement is attributable to better management, some is also due to the way some patients in A&E are designated and therefore counted. It finds for example that the current target would not have been possible without some form of patient re-designation or re-labelling taking place. Further it finds that the current target is so demanding that the integrity of reported performance is open to question and that a different approach is needed. Related incentives and demand management issues resulting from this Government target are also briefly discussed

Leeds Free School Meals Research Project (Phase 2 Report: Findings from the pilot phase Leeds Metropolitan University)

Free school meals aim to provide a “nutritional safety net” for the poorest UK children. Yet it is estimated that up to 30% of those entitled do not take up this entitlement. In Leeds approximately 6,000 children do not take the free school meals that they are entitled to. National and local targets are for 100% take up. Phase 2 of the Leeds Free School Meal Research Project aimed to develop, implement and evaluate a series of interventions to increase the uptake of free school meals. The interventions were tested in ten Leeds schools between December 2007 and October 2008. The research was undertaken by the Department of Nutrition & Dietetics within The Centre of Food Nutrition and Health at Leeds Metropolitan University on behalf of Education Leeds