Why should we consider health equity? The rationale for treating health as a special good rests on the idea that a certain level of health is a precondition for achieving any of the other outcomes in life that we value.… Read More »The role of healthcare in promoting health equity
Last year the UK government announced the establishment of a £600 million cancer drug fund, to be spent over 3 years. This represents a minuscule amount of money compared to the NHS’s annual budget, which is in excess of £100,000,000,000. However, it… Read More »Cancer drugs and public preferences
Submission from David Parkin There’s a problem with the way that health economists and others describe the properties that a health state index should have. The main reason we want such an index is to calculate Quality Adjusted Life Years.… Read More »What does a health value of zero mean?
Recently, I’ve witnessed an ever-increasing number of condition-specific utility measures being developed. Much work is being carried out by The University of Sheffield on measures such as the AQL-5D for asthma, and the EORTC-8D for cancer. I struggle to see their use.… Read More »Condition-specific utility measures?
I was recently directed towards a new report on the EQ-5D, by the NICE Decision Support Unit at the University of Sheffield. As health economists we can all see the benefits of a measure like the EQ-5D, but it’s also… Read More »The EQ-5D: Keep calm and carry on
The ‘well-being valuation method’ is a recently developed technique for valuing the effect, in monetary terms, of a health problem on an individual’s well-being. The method involves calculating the compensating variation necessary to maintain the same level of well-being after suffering from… Read More »The well-being valuation approach: Solution or convolution?
Back in 2005, NICE and the Department of Health here in the UK set about trying to figure out the level at which society valued a QALY, and also whether different QALYs should be assigned different values. The results of… Read More »Is a QALY a QALY or not? The SVQ project and the value of life
