Health Economics.

 advised but first, a big thank you to DCP 3 for their support  DCP 3 stands for disease control priorities.

3rd edition DCP 3 is a 9-volume series that promote to use of economic evaluation for priority setting.

across the world, particularly in developing countries DCP 3 has been produced by experts in health from.

from across the world, the project has been led by a team at the University of Washington's Department of global health it's important and fascinating work and it aspires to change the way of the world and save life find out more at DCP 3 org or click on the link that's in the description below now my very broad definition of economics and a small caveat this is not an answer you want to put in an exam this is rather something you'd write out in left-handed crayon my definition of economics is economics is the same of how we decide what to do with our stuff and by stuff, I don't just mean money I mean how you decide how you're going to spend you're time how you decide how you're going to spend your vote how does that you decide who it is that you're going to marry .

it's about you're preferences and incentives and disincentives that drive the decisions that you make and by you I mean you as an individual or a company or a firm or an NGO or UN agency for a country any individual or social aggregate that's making a decision about what to do with their stuff their time etc. they're making an economic decision.

     HEALTH ECONOMICS

now let's talk about economics and health what decisions  get made that affect health and how can we use economics to better understand those decisions first let's think of ourselves as individuals every day we make choices some of them are lifestyle choices what am I going to eat how  much am I going to exercise some of them are choices about the extent to which we're going to access health care and whenever we make those decisions we are weighing up the value of the expected outcome  or the benefit against some set of alternatives.

next healthcare providers pharmaceutical companies health insurance companies also need to make choices and decisions and their choices are large about setting the right prices and providing the right quantity of health care related products in healthcare-related services of course, that price-setting has got a lot to do with the cost of producing healthcare service.

of producing that product governments need to make decisions about how to spend their healthcare budget they're interested in getting the most bang for their buck but they're also interested in things like distributive justice and providing care for the poor incidentally, I've got a video on distributive justice and I'll provide a link for that in the description below .

 

governments need to make decisions like whether are they  going to rely on private healthcare provision or should healthcare be free at the point of service and if so which services.

should be included NGOs and bilateral and multilateral funding agencies need to decide how it is that they're going to spend their resources  and their money and how it is that they're going to get the most bang for their buck to choose between possible interventions they made decide to calculate the cost per disability-adjusted life year averted  for those interventions in each of these examples somebody either acting for themselves or acting on behalf of some sort of aggregate or some sort of organization is needing to make a decision.

and each case that decision is driven largely by the perceived value of the outcome of the various options so economics tries to find a way of understanding and quantifying that value and that benefit and that utility and so better understanding the way decisions are made.

          TRACHOMA

let's look at an example the cost of treating crow coma which is an eye infection that Couse blindness mostly in sub-Saharan Africa is about thirty to forty dollars per Daly averted whereas the cost of treating schizophrenia is about $6,000  per Daly averted so the same amount of money an NGO or government could theoretically buy 200 times more  Daly's averted by investing in treatment for trachoma now importantly this only makes sense if there's actually incidences of trachoma in the population that you're considering to health economic information is at its most powerful when it's combined with good epidemiological data now remember cost-effectiveness is an important factor that gets used in decision making by policymakers and governments and NGOs but it's not the only factor.