Spring 2026 CHE Research Summaries
Posted on Thursday 4 June 2026
In Who cancels? Inequalities in cancellations of care during the pandemic, researchers disentangled supply and demand-side cancellations by investigating how the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic April–July 2020 affected planned healthcare in England. The study quantified which socio-demographic and clinical groups faced ‘double jeopardyʼ and how this varied by treatment type across three categories of care: tests/consultations, operations/procedures, and targeted therapies/other treatments. The research demonstrated the importance of understanding the interplay of provider and patient behaviour in order to address and mitigate inequalities in access to care arising when care is disrupted.
In Assessing the value for money of hypertension control in Pakistan ,researchers looked at the costs and benefits of a community based intervention to reduce blood pressure in the context of Pakistan. Building on a previous economic evaluation, the study used a more realistic threshold against which to assess cost-effectiveness, as well as factoring in the long-term savings made from avoiding cardiovascular events. The results showed that compared to standard care, the intervention increases costs by about US$105 per person but averts about 0.416 DALYs over a lifetime, giving a measure of extra cost per DALY averted (incremental cost-effectiveness ratio - ICER) of around US$252. Although this is much lower than the results from the previous study, when a more realistic threshold for Pakistan was used, the intervention was not deemed to be cost-effective..
In Research across borders: assessing the transferability of data and methods, researchers examined whether results of studies conducted using real-world health data (i.e. patient-level information collected as part of clinical registers and other studies) can help lower-income European countries make better decisions about which treatments to fund. The study assessed the methods used for the analysis of real-world data in studies undertaken to determine the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of healthcare treatments. It also included interviews with experts and representatives from health technology assessment HTA agencies in lower-income European countries. The results showed a clear message for policy makers: if we want to share health data in ways that can help to assess the costs of new treatments and potentially address health inequalities, we cannot just develop new methods and models. It is vital to also invest in "data plumbing".
In Paying for health equity: can financial incentives help close the health gap? researchers explored if the NHS could redesign quality payments to GPs in order to actively promote health equity. Using the payment system that currently operates in primary care - the Quality Outcome Framework QOF - as a case study, the study developed a methodology to predict how GPs would alter their clinical effort if the financial rewards for specific care activities were changed. The study tested several scenarios, such as increasing the payment for treating patients from the most deprived areas while simultaneously reducing the payment for treating the least deprived. The study demonstrated that financial incentives can be used to direct more healthcare, and thus more health benefits, towards specific socio-economic groups.
In Incorporating system-level risk into the valuation of healthcare investments researchers showed that extending conventional analysis to include system-level risks can help capture the full value of healthcare interventions. Utilising concepts from financial economics, which explicitly consider how investments perform under system-level risks, the study illustrated the approach through four key concepts applied to disease elimination and eradication programmes, showing how each captures value that conventional methods tend to miss. Results suggest that some longer-term healthcare investments may be considered better value when using this approach to evaluation than if more standard health economics methods are used.
All five Research Summaries are available to download from our outputs page. They provide accessible, policy-focused overviews of research at CHE and are designed to support evidence-informed decision making across health and social care.
Would you like to receive our next research summary directly in your inbox? Sign up for our mailing list.