Cam Donaldson
Yunus Chair and Distinguished Professor of Health Economics
Yunus Centre
Cam is Yunus Chair and Distinguished Professor of Health Economics, and from 2016-21, served as GCU’s Pro Vice-Chancellor Research. His interests include: eliciting patients’ and public preferences for health care; development of priority-setting frameworks for use in local health and social care settings; economic evaluation of innovations in clinical and public health practice; microfinance, social business and social enterprise as public health initiatives.
Cam is involved in research projects relating to:
- Developing and evaluating economic and ethico-legal frameworks for priority setting in health and social care, having received funding from Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Canadian Health Services Research Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Department of Health and Social Care in England, and, currently, the Chief Scientist Office of Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorate.
- FinWell projects on financial lives, health and well-being amongst low-income individuals. FinWell Glasgow was funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorate; FinWell London by Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity, and FinWell Covid by the Economic and Social Research Council.
- Common Health Assets: a mixed methods realist evaluation and economic appraisal of how community-led organisations impact the health and wellbeing of people living in deprived areas, funded by the National Institute for Health Research and following from the CommonHealth research programme which Cam led from 2014-19, funded by the Medical Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.
- Tools to value health outcomes in pediatric populations, funded by the Medical Research Future Fund of the Government of Australia and following earlier projects funded by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (Values in Priority Setting), the European Commission (European Value of a QALY, or EuroVaQ) and the Department of Health and Social Care in England (Social Value of a QALY, or SVQ).
- CommonHealth Catalyst: Developing a Community Research Consortium to Address Health Disparities, working in Lanarkshire and funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council. (Put this one immediately after CommonHealth Assets.)
- Public values, Universal Basic Income and health: developing a mixed-methods study to elicit and deliberate public values for Universal Basic Income and comparator policies in relation to their impact on population health and health inequalities, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research.
Cam first became a Professor of Health Economics at the University of Aberdeen in 1996, before going on to hold the Svare Chair at the University of Calgary (1998-2002) and the Health Foundation Chair at Newcastle University (2002-2010, and won in a UK-wide funding competition).
As well as the Health Foundation Chair, Cam’s work has been recognised through a number of other competitive awards and distinctions:
- 2008-2012 National Institute for Health Research, Inaugural Senior Investigator
- 2003- 2004 Public Service Fellow, ESRC Advanced Institute of Management Research
- 2000-2002 Canadian Institutes for Health Research Senior Investigator
- 1998-2003 Senior Scholar Award, Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research
Cam has served on several policy-related committees, such as chairing the FPA’s Expert Panel on the Economics Sexual Health in England and membership of the NICE Appraisal Committee. He has chaired or been a member of several research committees at MRC, NIHR and the Wellcome Trust. He has served as Associate Editor of Social Business and on the Editorial Boards of Health Economics, Social Science and Medicine and Health Policy.
Cam has also served as organiser of the Health Economists’ Study Group, Secretary of the International Society on Priorities in Health and on the Board of the International Health Economics Association.
Since 2013, he has been Chair of the Scientific Committee of the annual Social Business Academia Conference, the main meeting for the growing international academic network of Yunus Social Business Centres.
In 2022, Cam was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and, in 2023, was listed by Research.com in the top 350 Economics and Finance Scientists (32nd in the UK) all-time by citations and publications.
Cam has supervised 20 PhD students to completion and supervised 27 post-graduate research and clinical fellows at universities around the world. Currently, his main international collaborations are with Professors Emily Lancsar at Australian National University and Craig Mitton at University of British Columbia.