Establishing Quality Adjusted Life Year weights for end of life
Criteria used by the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) and National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to assess end-of-life (EoL) technologies mean these medicines can be provided even if there is a large opportunity cost.
However, empirical evidence of public preferences is equivocal for EoL health gains and limited for the value given to different types of EoL health benefits – in the form of both quality-of-life (QoL) improvement and life-extension (LE).
In this study, we use Stated Preference methods (Willingness to Pay and Person Trade Off) to examine individual and societal preferences for health gains at the EoL relative to those from non-terminal health problems (Non-EoL) and for different types of EoL health gains.
Aims: We examine individual and societal preferences for health gains at the EoL relative to those from non-terminal health problems (Non-EoL) and for different types of EoL health gains.
Research questions
- Are preferences toward EoL treatments that increase life expectancy (EoL-LE) contingent upon the severity of the non-EoL comparator?
- Are preferences for EoL treatments contingent upon the type of health gain, i.e. life expectancy vs quality of life?
- Are preferences for EoL treatments contingent upon the preference elicitation method used, i.e. Willingness to Pay (WTP) vs. Person trade-off (PTO)?
- Are WTP/PTO responses linked to underlying societal perspectives?
Publication
- Neil McHugh, Jose Luis Pinto Prades, Rachel Baker, Helen Mason, Cam Donaldson (2020) Exploring the relative value of end of life QALYs: (Quality Adjusting Life Years) are the comparators important? Social Science & Medicine 245:112660
Project lead:
Professor Jose Luis Pinto Prades