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Our research
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 to 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 imply 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 developments of frameworks to support priority setting within the health care 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 outputs of our work
Current projects
Is ‘end-of-life’ care more valuable?
Is ‘end-of-life’ care more valuable? Measuring societal values using the new Q2S method
Managing finances and multiple long-term health conditions
Managing finances and multiple long-term health conditions: eliciting the perspectives of low-income individuals
Developing and evaluating an economic and ethico-legal framework for priority setting in health and social care.
Health and Social Care Partnerships (HSCPs), created in Scotland, are collaborations between the NHS and local authorities, with third-sector representation
Establishing QALY weights for end of life (EQWEL)
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.