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 patients’ evaluations of nursing care services in terms of achievements of two functionings, “living arts” and “accessing social services.” 2. Next, identifying patients’ 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.
