Richard Cookson
Professor

Profile

Biography

Richard Cookson is a Professor at the Centre for Health Economics, and Co-Director of the Equity in Health Policy (Equipol) research group.

Richard’s research focuses on equity in health and health care and is summarised in this 15-minute YorkTalk and his inaugural lecture. He has helped to develop local health equity indicators for the NHS; equity-informative health economic evaluation; and methods for gauging public concern for reducing health inequality.

Richard edited the Oxford University Press handbook of distributional cost-effectiveness analysis, and co-founded Special Interest Groups on this topic for the International Health Economics Association and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research.

Richard is an Honorary Public Health Academic, Public Health England and a member of the NHS Advisory Committee for Resource Allocation. He has co-chaired various international working groups on equity; served on the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) Technology Appraisal Committee 2002-7, the Public Health Interventions Advisory Committee 2007-9 and the NHS Outcomes Framework Technical Advisory Committee 2012-16; and was seconded to the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit in the Treasury in 2010.

He helped set up the UK Health Equity Network in 1999, edited the public health section of the Elsevier On-Line Encyclopedia of Health Economics 2012-14, and edited the collected works of Jonathan Bradshaw, Anthony Culyer and Alan Maynard in free e-book formats.

Richard holds a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics and a DPhil in Economics from the University of York, and an MPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford. After completing his doctorate, he worked at the Centre for Health Economics (1997-8), the London School of Economics LSE Health and Social Care (1998-00), the University of East Anglia School of Medicine, Health Policy and Practice (2000-6) and the University of York School for Business and Society (2006-10).

He also writes the occasional blog about health economic issues.

Research

Overview

• equity in health and health care

Projects

• NIHR Senior Research Fellowship, fellowship research programme (PDF , 427kb) 2014-18
• Developing Indicators of Change in NHS Equity Performance 2013-15, funded by the NIHR HS&DR programme

Recent projects

• PHRC Project on Distributional Cost-Effectiveness Analysis 2012-13, funded by the Department of Health Public Health Research Consortium (PHRC)
• Effects of Competition on Healthcare Equity 2007-10, funded by the NIHR SDO programme
• Public Views on Health Inequality Trade-Offs – A Feasibility Study, 2013/14, supported by the Wellcome Trust/University of York C2D2 programme
• European Collaboration for Healthcare Optimization (ECHO) 2011-14, funded by the EU FP7.  Comparing hospital utilisation and      outcomes in six European Union countries, this project is led by Enrique Bernal-Delgado, Institute for Health Sciences in Aragon, Spain, with the UK team led by Dr Karen Bloor, University of York.
• Chronic Disorders of Consciousness Research Centre, a cross-departmental research group led by Celia Kitzinger, Department of Sociology, and supported by the Wellcome Trust/University of York C2D2 programme

Research group(s)

• Health Policy Team
• Team for Economic Evaluation and Health Technology Assessment

Supervision

Current PhD students

• James Love-Koh from 2013, co-supervised with Susan Griffin from CHE
• Estela Capelas Barbosa from 2011

Former PhD students

• Ricardo Rodrigues, from 2011-15, co-supervised with Caroline Glendinning from the Social Policy Research Unit
• Yeunsook Rho 2009-13
• Laetitia Schmitt 2011-15
• Mauro Laudicella 2007-10, thesis advisor, with Andrew Jones and Nigel Rice
• Shehzad Ali 2006-9
• Robert Fleetcroft 2005-8, MD co-supervised with Amanda Howe, Norwich Medical School

External activities

Media coverage

• BBC Radio 4
  9 July 2014 (18 mins 30 in)
  The Moral Maze 
• BBC Radio 4
  15 July 2014
  You and Yours 
• Guardian
  14 October 2011
  Hospital competition has not undermined NHS fairness 
• Financial Times
  19 October 2011
  Market forces in NHS have not hit poor, says study 
• BBC1
  16 June 2009
  The Big Questions debate on rationing by age

Blogs

• Cookson R
  11 July 2014
  Bean counting and the NHS 
• Cookson R
  18 July 2014
  The psychology of tax and spend