Accessibility statement

Economic evaluation of public health interventions

CHE has played a significant role in both appraising and developing appropriate methods for the economic evaluation of public health interventions. This includes research on the incorporation of equity and inequality concerns within economic evaluation; the choice of discount rate; the investment profile for interventions (i.e. the timing at which costs and benefits are realised); and evaluating interventions with costs and benefits falling across different sectors.

The evaluation of public health interventions raises a number of potential challenges in applying standard economic evaluation methods. Public health interventions can generate health benefits far into the future and this poses a challenge for the attribution and valuation of intervention effects. Similarly, the degree to which early intervention can influence future spending, and the timing of any cost offsets, may be subject to uncertainty. The breadth of an intervention’s impact may extend beyond the health sector, requiring consideration of costs and benefits that fall on other sectors. Even within the health care sector, the outcomes of value may extend beyond simply improving the health of individuals to improving the capability of individuals to maintain their own health, and to the improvement of health inequalities.  

Senior staff undertaking research in this area include: Richard CooksonSusan Griffin, Mark Sculpher, Helen Weatherly, Gerry Richardson, Laura Bojke, Karl Claxton (TEEHTA team) and Marc Suhrcke (Global Health team)