Towards a comprehensive estimate of national spending on prevention

Background Comprehensive information about national spending on prevention is crucial for health policy development and evaluation. This study provides a comprehensive overview of prevention spending in the Netherlands, including those activities beyond the national health accounts. Methods National spending on health-related primary and secondary preventive activities was examined by funding source with the use of national statistics, government reports, sector reports, and data from individual health associations and corporations, public services, occupational health services, and personal prevention. Costs were broken down by diseases, age groups and gender using population-attributable risks and other key variables. Results Total expenditures on prevention were €12.5 billion or €769 per capita in the Netherlands in 2003, of which 20% was included in the national health accounts. 82% was spent on health protection, 16% on disease prevention, and 2% on health promotion activities. Most of the spending was aimed at the prevention of infectious diseases (34%) and acute physical injuries (29%). Per capita spending on prevention increased steeply by age. Conclusion Total expenditure on health-related prevention is much higher than normally reported due to the inclusion of health protection activities beyond the national health accounts. The allocative efficiency of prevention spending, particularly the high costs of health protection and the low costs of health promotion activities, should be addressed with information on their relative cost effectiveness

The Advanced Implantation Detector Array (AIDA)

The Advanced Implantation Detector Array (AIDA) is a state-of-the-art detector system for the measurement of the decay properties of exotic nuclei at fragmentation/fission facilities. Built around stacks of up to eight 8cm×8cm, 128 × 128 strip (16384 pixels) or up to four 24cm×8cm, 384 × 128 strip (49152 pixels) double sided silicon strip detectors, the positions of both implanted ions and their subsequent decay products can be measured to sub-mm precision. The large number of pixels per detector provide implant-decay correlations at implantation rates ∼kHz. To process signals from the large number of strips application specific integrated circuits provide low and high gain signal processing per strip (20 GeV and 20 MeV full scale range) with a dynamic range of 1000:1, or better. A summary of the system and the analysis methodologies used are presented