Dear all,
LSE Health and Social Care Discussion Paper 4 has now been published.
First aid: Lessons in health economics for economic evaluation in social welfare.
By Sarah Byford and Tom Sefton
ISBN [0 7530 15714]
* Abstract
Beyond health care, the economic evaluation of social welfare programmes is rare but the demand for such evaluation is rising. To encourage greater use of economic evaluation, undoubtedly social welfare researchers need to gain a better understanding of the philosophy behind such evaluation and the methodologies necessary to carry these out in practice. However, there is also a need for economists to better understand the nature of social welfare interventions in order to ensure that the approaches they adopt are appropriate and feasible. This paper explores the principles that guide health economists, the evaluation issues raised by different types of intervention and the techniques used to address them, focusing on the implications for evaluating other social welfare interventions. It argues that there exists a spectrum of complexity in interventions, with many social welfare interventions demonstrating a level of complexity that is less often reached by health care services. This can cause problems for the application of 'traditional' economic evaluation techniques favoured by health economists, such as the measurement of generic outcomes and the randomisation of subjects between interventions. The paper concludes that efforts need to be made to ensure greater scientific validity of evaluations in social welfare research, whilst recognising that the complexity of many interventions may require greater attention to the details of trial design and modifications or additions to the 'conventional' model, such as a greater role for qualitative methods.
* Availability
Hard copies of papers are available at Waterstone's Economist Bookstore on Portugal Street WC2A 2AB at £7.50 each. Waterstone's may be contacted in the following ways:-
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7405 5531 Fax: ++44 (0)20 7430 1584
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Alternatively electronic copies are available from our web site at
http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/lsehsc/newdpseries.htm
You will need Adobe Acrobat version 4.0 or above to open the file which is in pdf format. Please refer to the web site for details on how to obtain this programme.
For further details on the DP series contact:
Ms Champa Heidbrink
Managing Editor, LSE Health and Social Care
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++44 (0) 207 955 6840
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