On Measurement and Evaluation of Health Care Services Based on the Capability Approach
应用阿马蒂亚·森的能力方法，通过实证研究护理服务，提出基于患者功能实现和利用能力相似性推断能力集前沿的操作方法，用于评估医疗保健服务。
The purpose of this paper is to apply the capability approach, which was proposed by Amartya Sen, to measuring and evaluating health care services. More concretely, this paper examines the operational method of applying the capability approach based on an empirical research on nursing care services. The points of formulation are the following three. 1. The informational base is patientsʼ evaluations of nursing care services in terms of achievements of two functionings, “living arts” and “accessing social services.” 2. Next identifying patientsʼ groups according to the similarity of utilization abilities, 3. Finally, inferring the frontier of the capability set of each group, by aggregating the functioning vectors achieved by members of each group. The inferred frontier of the capability set represents an opportunity set, from which an individual can freely choose an optimal functioning vector according to her own evaluation function.