There is, therefore, a disparity in the patients' perceptions of the benefits of scale and polish, and the normative clinical findings.
In normative terms, the findings relate to BIONOF, but in a way that displays a general rule, that 'once the camel's nose gets inside the tent rapidly becomes uncomfortable', i.e., once government is involved, legal norms apply, originating in public law and impacting on the set-up of the PPP-arrangement at hand.
Seen through the lens of normative theory, the findings highlight key challenges for prioritarianism applied to priority setting.
To develop normative data, our findings have been integrated with available data from in vivo ultrasound scans and neonatal studies.
Expanding on normative work, our findings suggest that how work gets prioritized is dependent on various factors including perceived compatibilities between patient safety initiatives and perceived risks of doing these initiatives.
Based on these findings, normative data may have limited relevance to a clinical environment unless the same measurement methods used to obtain published data are also used in the clinical setting where they are applied.
Our findings highlight normative tensions and the importance of critically engaging with these normative issues (in addition to the current focus on a procedural justice approach to health policy).
In addition, the study carefully examined the links between the findings and normative theory.
A second shortcoming frequently identified and criticised in empirical research in medical ethics rests upon the problem of drawing normative conclusions from empirical findings [ 3, 4, 16].
This paper sheds light on that specific trade-off and on the public support for prioritarianism by providing fresh empirical evidence and by clarifying the close links between the findings and normative theory.
