- Department: Health Sciences
- Module co-ordinator: Mr. Steve Parrott
- Credit value: 10 credits
- Credit level: M
- Academic year of delivery: 2022-23
- See module specification for other years: 2021-22
Occurrence | Teaching period |
---|---|
B | Spring Term 2022-23 |
To provide students with a structured approach to applying economic techniques to the study of health and healthcare. To provide students with the skills to understand and apply economic evaluation techniques alongside other evaluative methodologies and to interpret the results.
By the end of the module, students will be able to:
One-hour lectures will be followed by practical sessions and problem solving exercises to build upon and consolidate the lecture material.
1. Economics and health: an introduction: Introduction of some basic economics concepts and how they relate to health and health care. At the end of the session students should have some understanding of how simple markets work and the role of price and willingness and ability to pay as one means of allocating scarce resources.
2. Markets and market failure for health and health care: The aim of this session is to explore whether the simple market model would work for health and health care. What are the special features of the demand and supply of health and health care? What are the different ways health markets may “fail” and some type of government action may be needed to ensure socially efficient levels and types of health care production.
3. Introduction and overview of economic evaluation: The different types of economic evaluation techniques will be briefly reviewed in this session. At the end of the session the students should be able to assess which type of economic method should be applied to answer different evaluation questions and the advantages and disadvantages of the different techniques.
4. Identifying, measuring and valuing costs in an economic evaluation: The topics covered in this session will include: which costs should be included in different types of study. The session looks at costs from an economic perspective including variable and fixed costs, average and marginal costs, and how the choice of costs will have an impact upon evaluation results. The importance of study perspective will be used to illustrate why national guidance is needed to ensure evaluations are compatible.
5. Measuring consequences in an economic evaluation: This session will look at measuring the outcomes in health services research. We will examine disease specific measures, health profiles, and health utility measures. A comprehensive guide to the use of EQ-5D will be included, with some practical examples.
6. Sources of Health Economic Data: This session will explore the various data resources available to health economists. We will examine health economic cost data, such as reference costs and databases, PSSRU costs and also databases of economic evaluations.
7. The UK experience in pharmaceuticals and medical devices HTA - the case of NICE: NICE and the evaluation of pharmaceuticals and devices
8. Models and economic evaluations: This session will look at the role of decision models in health economic evaluation. We will cover decision trees and Markov models and provide examples of these modelling techniques in practice. We will also look at the limitations of such approaches and how to conduct probabilistic sensitivity analysis to demonstrate uncertainty around parameter inputs.
9. Models and economic evaluations 2: A look at the types of models used in health economics with examples and practicals.
Task | Length | % of module mark |
---|---|---|
Online Exam - 24 hrs (Centrally scheduled) Open exam |
N/A | 100 |
None
Task | Length | % of module mark |
---|---|---|
Online Exam - 24 hrs (Centrally scheduled) Open exam |
N/A | 100 |
Students are provided with collective exam feedback relating to their cohort, within the timescale specified in the programme handbook.
Main Course Texts
Other useful books
Journals
Directed reading in the handbook uses the following journals:
Websites and other electronic sources
Databases of economic evaluations: