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Health Economics: news

March 2012

• MSc Economics of Health applications being accepted for 2012/13. Please see here for application procedures and further information. Alternatively, please contact the programme directors: Eleonora Fichera or William Whittaker.

 

  February 2012

• The Health Economics group will be presenting 6 papers at the 2012 European Conference on Health Economics at Zürich University. More Details on the conference can be found here.

1. Steve Birch - Affordability as a positive concept: Analysing how households meet the costs of care across communities and between conditions
2. Yiu-Shing Lau, Thomas Mason & Matt Sutton - How do financial incentives to improve the quality of care lead to better patient outcomes?
3. Will Whittaker - Diagnosing financial problems for the State – an analysis of the impacts of different health problems on public finances
4. Mark Harrison, Ian Jacob, Matt Sutton, John Radford and Andrew Renehan - Modelling capacity for more resource-intensive services - An application of Discrete Event Simulation to Flexible Sigmoidoscopy for colorectal cancer
5. Silviya Nikolova & Matt Sutton - Can differences in Patient Reported Outcome Measures be attributed to providers?
6. Eleonora Fichera & Matthew Sutton - Health interventions, health shocks and individual health investments: An Economic Analysis of the English Old Population

See abstracts

 

January 2012

• Prof. Steve Birch presented at the Faculty of Dentistry, McGill University as part of their Research Seminar Series. The topic title was "Exploring continuity of care in publicly funded dentistry: making dollars or making sense?". More details can be found here.

 

• Prof. Steve Birch has contributed to the most recent edition of The Elgar Companion to Health Economics. The chapter is entitled "Decision rules in economics evaluation revisited" and is co-authored with Amiram Gafni. The book provides an authoritative and comprehensive overview of modern health economics.

 

• Award of £1 million grant from the Department of Health to evaluate Payment by Results (PbR) for Drug and Alcohol Recovery
  A team from the Health Sciences Research Group has been successful in gaining a £1million Department of Health Policy Research Programme grant to evaluate Payment by Results (PbR) schemes in the treatment of addiction. The Manchester team will be led by Dr Michael Donmall, Director of the National Drug Evidence Centre (NDEC) & Reader in Health Sciences, and Prof Matt Sutton, Professor of Health Economics, together with Dr Tim Millar and Andrew Jones. The research project, to be conducted over three years, is being undertaken in collaboration with colleagues at the Institute for Criminal Policy Research, Birkbeck, University of London, RAND Europe and UserVoice. It will deliver a robust assessment of this important new approach to the care of problem drug users, in work that has key national policy implications. Thomas Mason and Matt Sutton will undertake the economic component of the evaluation. Further details of the study are available on the DH website.
   

 

• Eleonora Fichera will be presenting the following paper at the Centre for the Study of African Economies 2012 conference, Oxford University (18-20 March 2012).
  
  • Disney R., Fichera E. Owens T. - Credit constraints and credit spillovers in formal and informal markets: Evidence from Malawi  
    This paper uses Malawi household data on formal and informal credit to test: a) whether households are liquidity constrained, that is, whether, an increase in the borrowing limit affects credit demand; and b) whether there are spillovers between credit sources, that is, the credit limit of one sector has an impact on the demand for credit in another sector. Using a set of measures of local competition between lenders to disentangle demand and supply equations, we find that a ten percentage point increase in the informal credit limit increases credit demand by about the same amount; and a ten percentage point increase in the credit limit of the microfinance programs increases the demand for formal credit by more than four percentage points. An increase of ten percentage points in the credit limit of one microfinance program decreases informal demand by about seven percentage points, indicating significant evidence of spillover effects.

 

• The Health Economics group is due to have 3 papers presented at the Royal Economics Society annual conference in March at the University of Cambridge.

1. Eleonora Fichera, Hugh Gravelle, Mario Pezzino & Matt Sutton - Specification of financial incentives for quality in health care contracts in England
2. Thomas Mason, Matt Sutton, William Whittaker & Stephen Birch - The youth of today are sickening: Implications of age and cohort effects in health and service use for NHS planning
3. William Whittaker - The pursuit of happiness? Subjective wellbeing and internal migration in Great Britain.

See abstracts

 

• The Health Economics group has recently had 5 papers presented at the joint HESG/CES meeting in Aix-en-Provence.

1. Søren Rud Kristensen, Eduardo Fé-Rodríguez, Mickael Bech & Jan Mainz - The price sensitivity of acute stroke care
2. Thomas Mason, Matthew Sutton, Peter Smith & Stephen Campbell - Paying he who pays the piper: who calls the tune now? Incentives for commissioners of health care
3. Tommy Allen, Eleonora Fichera, Matt Sutton - Can payers use prices to improve quality? Evidence fromEnglish hospitals
4. Silviya Nikolova & Matt Sutton - Can differences in Patient Reported Outcome Measures be attributed to providers?
5. Eduardo Fé-Rodríguez & Bruce Hollingsworth - Estimating the effect of retirement on health via panel discontinuity designs

See abstracts

• The Health Economics group is pleased to welcome Dr. Syed Mohiuddin. Syed is working with Prof. Katherine Payne on the mOMEnt (management of Otitis Media with Effusion in childreN with clefT palate) project. The project is about developing an economic model and a value of information analysis to check the feasibility of using ventilation tubes (grommets) for children with cleft palate. Syed previously worked for University of Warwick as a Research Fellow in Health Technology Assessments and for University of Wolverhampton as an Operational Research Lecturer.

 

• The Health Economics group is pleased to welcome Martin Eden. Martin will be working with Prof. Katherine Payne on the Regard Study. This project is about developing and evaluating genetics services for people with retinal dystrophy. Martin has previously been involved with pharmacy workforce projects and has worked on RCTs of complex interventions in pharmacy and primary care.

 

December 2011

• Eleonora Fichera has been invited to to give a seminar at the Development Economics Seminar series 2011/12 at the School of Economics, University of Nottingham (14th of March). She will present the paper Credit constraints and credit spillovers in formal and informal markets: Evidence from Malawi.

 

• Ian Jacob presented current research examining the implementation of flexible sigmoidoscopy for colorectal cancer screening to the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre’s Board of Governors. This study aimed to inform decision makers on how to plan the capacity required to deliver a flexible sigmoidoscopy population-based screening service within a large conurbation, the Greater Manchester and Cheshire Cancer Network. A simulation model was developed to explore alternative screening service scenarios and identify key resource constraints. This research may help to inform the planning and delivery of an efficient screening service for colorectal cancer screening.

 

November 2011

• Matt Sutton was awarded a Visiting Research Scholarship to the Melbourne Institute for Economic and Social Research. He presented two seminars on 'State and self investments in health' and 'Can payers use prices to improve quality? Evidence from English hospitals' and worked with Professor Anthony Scott to initiate joint work on doctors’ labour markets and pay for performance schemes using the National GP Worklife Survey in England, now in its 6th Wave, and the MABEL longitudinal survey of Australian doctors.

 

• Steve Birch will be presenting a seminar at the University of British Columbia entitled "Not enough doctors or not enough needs: Refocusing health workforce planning from providers and services to populations and needs". More details available here. In addition Steve is the organiser of a special session on vulnerable populations at the Health Reform in Asian conference in Hong Kong December 9-12th and participating in an invitational workshop of the Ministry of Health of Malaysia on planning for oral health care in the national health system in Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur - December 12-16th.

 

Octocber 2011

• The Health Economics group is pleased to announce that 4 new researchers have joined the team this month. They will all make great contributions to the group’s research. More details are given below:

 

• Eleanor Heather is a Research Assistant in Health Economics. She has been awarded a NIHR Research Methods Fellowship to develop her skills in methods of economic evaluation applied to musculoskeletal conditions. The Fellowship runs for two-years. In the first year Eleanor will be studying towards a Masters in Health Economics and Decision Modeling run by the School of Health and Related Research at The University of Sheffield. In year 2, Eleanor will be working on a research project in the area of musculoskeletal conditions. People with inflammatory conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA), can now be offered highly effective but expensive biologic therapies including anti-TNF agents. These therapies can cause minor or major, short-term or long-term AEs, which forces patients to make benefit:risk trade-offs. To date, economic models have not accounted for long-term AEs as the data were not available. The project will aim to quantify the impact of selected AEs on the cost effectiveness of anti-TNF therapies. Eleanor is supervised by Katherine Payne (Professor of Health Economics) and Deborah Symmons (Professor of Rheumatology & Musculoskeletal Epidemiology). In 2010, Eleanor obtained a first in economics and Spanish from the University of Dundee.

 

• Caroline Vass has recently started a PhD funded by the NIHR National School for Primary Care Research. The project involves investigating the framing of risk attributes in discrete choice experiments. DCEs are increasingly used to elicit benefit-risk trade-offs as this approach potentially provides information on individuals’ preferences for risk tolerability or to value risk reduction associated with healthcare interventions and services. However, little attention has been paid to the nature of how risk attributes are framed or perceived. The PhD combines qualitative methods in understanding how competing risk presentation formats affect cognition, decision rules, and the valuations derived, as well as quantitative methods in analysing preference heterogeneity. The PhD is supervised by Katherine Payne (Professor of Health Economics), Dan Rigby (Professor of Economics) and Dr Stephen Campbell (Primary Care). Caroline previously studied at the University of Birmingham where she achieved an Economics BSc in 2010 and a Health Economics MSc in 2011.

 

• Alex Thompson has been appointed to the position of Research Associate in Economic Evaluation. In July 2010, Alex obtained a first in economics from the University of York. He went on to study towards a Masters in Health Economics at York. Under the supervision of Katherine Payne (Professor of Health Economics), Alex is seeking to produce two papers on a randomised controlled trial for a pharmacogenetic test (the TARGET study). The first paper will investigate the potential impact on cost and effect of introducing this particular pharmacogenetic test in the NHS. The second paper will use a decision-analytic model to explore parameter and structural uncertainty. Alex will also be working with Katherine to develop new research proposals with a focus on the economics of genetics in primary care.

 

• James McDonald has been awarded a two year NIHR Research Methods Fellowship to develop skills in the methods of economic evaluation applied to health care. Currently James is working as a Research Assistant in Health Economics on a project involving the introduction of salaried general practitioners after the 1997 NHS (Primary Care) Act and the 2004 new General Medical Services Contract. James is supervised by Matt Sutton (Professor of Health Economics) and Bonnie Sibbald (Professor of Health Services Research). Previously James studied Economics at The University of Sheffield. On the completion of his undergraduate course James was awarded an Advanced Course Masters Studentship from the Medical Research Council to undertake an MSc in Economics and Health Economics. James’ dissertation aimed to investigate the ability to map the relationship between a non-preference based measure of health (EPDS) and a generic preference based measure of health (SF-6D).

 

September 2011

• Matt Sutton was invited to speak at a one-day workshop organised by the Norwegian Health Directorate and the European Observatory on Health Systems in Oslo on the 1st September. The workshop was on “Introducing Pay for Performance (P4P) in the Norwegian health system: Scoping relevant international experiences.” Matt presented a summary of research covering: “Experiences from the Quality and Outcomes Framework in the UK.”

 

• Congratulations to Dr. Fatiha Shabaruddin on the successful completion of her PhD from the University of Manchester. Her research was supervised by Katherine Payne (University of Manchester) and Rachel Elliott (University of Nottingham) and focused on the economic evaluation of pharmacogenetic tests. Fatiha has recently taken up a position at the University of Malaya, lecturing in both clinical pharmacy and health economics. We all wish her the best in this new role.

 

August 2011 

• Starting in September 2011 an Economics of Health MSc will be jointly provided by the Health Economics group and the Economics DA. The course offers students an opporunity to study economics to a postgraduate level, whilst also engaging in health economics research in the form of a supervised dissertation. The Health Economics group will provide dissertation topics that match the groups research interests and on the topics taught on the Economics of Health course in the second semester. Particulars of the course can be found here.

 

• Katherine Payne will be presenting on a panel of experts on the topic of "How will innovator technologies fare in an increasingly restrictive global reimbursement environment?: lessons from comparison of cell and gene therapies to conventional biopharmaceuticals" at ISPOR 14th Annual European Congress. The Issue Panel (IP10) will be held on Monday, 7 November 2011: 10:15-11:15. More information on the session can be found here.

 

• Matt Sutton delivered the key-note speech at the Nordic Health Economists' Study Group meeting on the 28th of August. The title of his presentation was: "Paying for improvements in quality: recent experiences in the NHS in England". Details of the conference are available here.

 

 July 2011 

• The Health Economics group will present 5 papers at the International Health Economics Association (iHEA) 8th World Congress on Health Economics in Toronto - July 10-13.

1. William Whittaker - The pursuit of happiness: Subjective wellbeing and internal migration in Great Britain
2. Matt Sutton, Silviya Nikolova & Ruth McDonald - Impact of a pay-for-quality programme in the North West of England on patient mortality risk
3. Mark Harrison , Mark Dusheiko, Tim Doran, Hugh Gravelle, Matt Sutton, Martin Roland - The impact of financial incentives for improvements in the quality of primary care on emergency hospital admission rates
4. Eleonora Fichera & Matt Sutton - State and Self Investments in Health
5. Stephen Birch - Integrating Workforce Planning within Health Care Planning

See abstracts

 

June 2011  

• The Health Economics group had 3 papers presented at the Summer HESG meeting in Bangor.

1. Søren Rud Kristensen, Matt Sutton, Mickael Bech - What may be the consequences of the NHS in England no longer paying hospitals for emergency readmissions?
2. Shing Lau, Silviya Nikolova and Matt Sutton - Did pressure to meet waiting times targets reduce quality of care?
3. Thomas Mason, Matt Sutton, William Whittaker, Stephen Birch - Forecasting service requirements in the NHS: Applying the Needs Based Analytical Framework.

See abstracts

 

• Fatiha Shabaruddin presented a poster entitled "Assessing the costs and benefits of a pharmacogenetic test to reduce the incidence of adverse events" at a recent conference hosted by Prescribing and Research in Medicines Management (PRIMM) in London June 24. This conference focused on the role of patients in reporting suspected Adverse Drug Reactions to pharmacovigilance centres. It was the first conference of its kind, bringing together academic researchers and teachers, practitioners, pharmacovigilance experts and patients to learn more about and debate this topic.

 

May 2011 

• Katherine Payne was an invited speaker and panelist at the European Perspectives in Personalised Medicine held in Brussels on 12 and 13th May 2011. The meeting was organised by The Health Directorate of the European Commission's DG Research and Innovation. Katherine presented on ‘Evaluating the costs and benefits of personalised medicine: A health economists perspective’. The conference aimed to take stock of recent achievements in health related research leading to personalised medicine and helped to identify and prioritise future actions needed at the European level. It brought together over 450 European and national level policy makers, industrial and academic researchers, patients, clinicians and other stakeholders.

 

• Katherine Payne is a member of the Expert Advisory Group for the ‘Theatre of Debate’ on Pharmacogenetics. Y Touring Theatre of Debate projects tour to schools throughout the UK. In essence the Theatre of Debate model consists of play, a debate and online educational resources.  Katherine presented on the ‘Pharmacogenetics: getting the best from our medicines (and the healthcare budget)’ at a workshop on 18th May 2011 in London. The aim of the Workshop was to provide information, differing viewpoints and stimuli to enable playwright Abi Bown to write an informed and engaging synopsis of a play for this Y Touring Theatre of Debate production that explores the social, moral, scientific and political questions raised by pharmacogenetics. The play tour will begin in November 2011.

 

April 2011

• Matt Sutton, of The University of Manchester, will deliver the key-note speech at the Nordic Health Economists' Study Group meeting in August 2011. He will present: "Paying for improvements in quality: recent experiences in the NHS in England". Details of the conference are available here.

 

• Linda Davies has joined the core group of methodological experts for the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). During the four year tenure, Linda will serve on the sub panels making funding recommendations for the NIHR Programme Grants for Applied Research scheme (PGfAR).

 

• The Health Economics group is pleased to be joined by new Research Associate Rachel Meacock. Rachel studied at the University of Sheffield where she obtained her BA Economics and MSc Economics and Health Economics focusing on economic evaluation as well as applied econometrics. She will now be working with Prof. Matt Sutton and Dr. Mark Harrison on a Department of Health funded evaluation of the piloted Women's Enhanced Medium Secure Services (WEMSS). These WEMSS pilot sites are intended to deliver women-centred, holistic care focussed on emotional well-being rather than physical security, and have cared for a sample of woman with complex mental health needs for the past three years.

 

March 2011

• Matt Sutton of The University of Manchester has been appointed as joint national organiser of the UK Health Economists' Study Group (HESG). The role will be shared with Stephen Morris from University College London. HESG was established in 1972 and performs two main functions: to act as a network; and to organise two conferences per year. These conferences provide a vibrant environment for health economists to interact and discuss ongoing research. More information about the Group can be found here and about the next meeting in Bangor here.

 

February 2011

• Research Associate Tommy Allen has been awarded a 4 year Faculty/Medical Research Council PhD studentship under the supervision of Prof. Matt Sutton and Dr William Whittaker. The project title is “The impact of provider incentives on professionals, patients and population health" and the focus of the research will be the impact of provider incentives on health outcomes. The study will use structural economic models to link incentives to provider behaviour and the resultant impact upon health care delivery and health outcomes. Existing literature on these incentive schemes focuses on the impact on health care delivery, with little attention paid to how these affect health care professionals and health outcomes.

 

• The Health Economics group is pleased to be joined again by Jurgita Januleviciute and for the first time by Søren Rud Kristensen. Jurgita is a visiting PhD student from the University of Bergen working on prioritisation in the health care sector and has worked closely with the group in the past. Søren is also a visiting PhD student from the University of Southern Denmark working on incentive and quality in hospital care. The two of them will make a great addition to the Health Economics group.

 

January 2011

• The Health Economics team has five papers presented at the winter HESG meeting in York:

1.  Thomas Allen & Matt Sutton - Revenue or Reputation: A Quantitative Analysis of General Practitioner Motivation and Peer Effects using Longitudinal Data
2. William Whittaker - The pursuit of happiness: Subjective wellbeing and internal migration in Great Britain
3. Mark Harrison, Mark Dusheiko, Tim Doran, Hugh Gravelle, Matt Sutton, Martin Roland - Does better management of chronic conditions in general practice reduce emergency hospital admissions?
4. Matt Sutton, Silviya Nikolova & Ruth McDonald - Impact of a pay-for-quality programme in the North West of England on patient mortality risk
5. J E Askildsen, T H Holmas, J Januleviciute, O Kaarboe, L Siciliani & M Sutton - Do hospitals respond to prices? Evidence from Norway
   

See abstracts

 

November 2010

• The Health Economics team is pleased to be joined by three new Research Associates: Thomas Mason, Yiu-Shing Lau and Thomas Allen. All three recently graduated from The University of Manchester's MSc Economics course having been supervised by Prof. Matt Sutton for a health economics dissertation. With them they bring a fresh knowledge of economics and a enthusiasm to apply this to health. Welcome aboard!

 

• PhD Student Fatiha Shabaruddin has been awarded the ISPOR Student Travel Grant which has enabled her to travel to the ISPOR 13th Annual European Congress, November 6-9, 2010. While there she presented a poster on: Examining Patient-Based Costs for Irinotecan Chemotherapy: UK Practice-Based Micro-Costing Study.

 

October 2010

• Silviya Nikolova will present at the Health, Econometrics and Data Group in York:

Title: Estimating the impact of covariates on waiting times for elective surgery in Scotland: a Conditional Density Estimation approach.

Authors: Silviya Nikolova, Matt Sutton

 

September 2010

• Katherine Payne has been announced as the winner of the 2010 Practice Research Conference Award, which is sponsored by the Pharmacy Practice Research Trust. The award will be presented at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society Conference on Monday 6th September, where Katherine will deliver a 30 minute lecture on her prize-winning research.

The Practice Research Award is presented annually to an individual who has made a significant contribution to the field of pharmacy practice research and has the potential to become a leader in their field. Dr Payne, Senior Research Fellow in Health Economics in the Health Sciences Research Group, will receieve the award in recognition of her work into the economics of pharmacogenetic tests and services.

Prof. Payne said: 'I was surprised and delighted to be told that I had won this award which acknowledges the contribution of my research that applies economic concepts and methods to the evaluation and valuation of pharmacogenetic tests and services. In theory, pharmacogenetics offers the perfect solution to the challenge of maximising value for money from medicines. Targeting medicines in this way should stop scarce healthcare resources being wasted. The reality is that we know pharmacogenetic tests are not perfect. My research aims to generate information on the relative patient (dis)benefits and health care costs of pharmacogenetic tests to support professional decision-making in the NHS.'

 

August 2010

• William Whittaker and Matt Sutton together with colleagues from the University of Glasgow and the University of Stirling have recently had their research, 'Predicting which people with psychosocial distress are at risk of becoming dependent on state benefits: analysis of routinely available data'; published in the British Medical Journal. The research, which claims GP attendance increases and a worsening mental health state can be identified up to three years prior to an individual claiming Incapacity Benefit; has been discussed in The Times, The Telegraph, The Yorkshire Post, and discussed on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Scotland