A cost and performance comparison of Public Private Partnership and public hospitals in Spain

© 2016 Caballer-Tarazona and Vivas-Consuelo. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.The Erratum to this article has been published in Health Economics Review 2016 6:20[EN] Public-private partnership (PPP) initiatives are extending around the world, especially in Europe, as an innovation to traditional public health systems, with the intention of making them more efficient. There is a varied range of PPP models with different degrees of responsibility from simple public sector contracts with the private, up to the complete privatisation of the service. As such, we may say the involvement of the private sector embraces the development, financing and provision of public infrastructures and delivery services. In this paper, one of the oldest PPP initiatives developed in Spain and transferred to other European and Latin American countries is evaluated for first time: the integrated healthcare delivery Alzira model. Through a comparison of public and PPP hospital performance, cost and quality indicators, the efficiency of the PPP experience in five hospitals is evaluated to identify the influence of private management in the results. Regarding the performance and efficiency analysis, it is seen that the PPP group obtains good results, above the average, but not always better than those directly managed. It is necessary to conduct studies with a greater number of PPP hospitals to obtain conclusive results.Caballer Tarazona, M.; Vivas Consuelo, DJJ. (2016). 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Dissection of QTL effects for root traits using a chromosome arm-specific mapping population in bread wheat

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Comparing population health in the United States and Canada

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The Importance of Geographic Access for the Impact of Microfinance

The geographic distance between a household and financial institutions may constitute a significant obstacle to achieving the benefits of modern financial institutions. We measure the impact of improved distance-related access to microcredits in Uzbekistan. Residents living closer to microfinance institutions are propensity score matched to those further away using both household and village characteristics. Households located closer to microfinance institutions have larger businesses in terms of income, profits and employees than similar households located further away. Similarly, they spend more on most forms of consumption and have greater savings

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Crystal structure of the Escherichia coli dUTPase in complex with a substrate analogue (dUDP)

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