Economics of health and wellbeing

This research group is researching resource allocation, societal wellbeing and distributional justice.

Decisions are made all the time about how shared resources are used – by government, by health and social care systems and by households. Decisions about public funds should be informed by information about the costs and impacts on different people, to determine whether one investment is better value for money than another. Beyond costs and benefits (or efficiency) are considerations of fairness and the distributional consequences of resource allocation in terms of ‘who gets what’. Faced with a fixed budget, all decisions incur opportunity costs and so there will be winners and losers.

Our research focuses on how best to allocate scarce resources from a societal perspective, assessing initiatives within the health and social care system, the third sector as well as in communities and households with the purpose of improving population health and wellbeing.  A number of studies explore social values and the just distribution of benefits. We undertake applied economic evaluations of health and social care interventions and complex community-based initiatives. Most of our health economic evaluations are collaborative projects, with colleagues across the School of Health and Life Sciences at GCU as well as NHS and academic partners elsewhere.

We have a track record of methodological research investigating and developing techniques for the elicitation of preferences and societal values and the development of frameworks to support priority setting within the healthcare system. We have world-leading expertise in health economics, Q methodology, preference elicitation and priority setting, and in the use of financial diaries to examine the links between microfinance, health and wellbeing.

Here, you can explore some of our projects and the outputs of our work

Current projects