Better health - it's all in the economics

What’s more important - spending on healthcare for cancer patients, or trying to prevent heart disease in otherwise healthy individuals? Should the UK focus on providing medication to combat obesity, or Alzheimer’s?

No single person can answer these questions, or would like to be in the position to have to. Nevertheless, difficult decisions about the value that can be attached to new treatments and medications accompany each and every discovery made by scientists. This is when experts such as University of Glasgow’s Chair in Health Policy & Economic Evaluation, Professor Andrew Briggs, have to provide assistance.

Professor Briggs, who works with seven colleagues in the area of health economics at the University explains: ‘I work with clinicians, epidemiologists and statisticians to get involved in thinking about the cost effectiveness and value of health interventions, what they mean for the population, and if we can actually use our resources better. We’ve always got to be thinking not just of the individual patient in front of us, but about the broad population. That is what economics is about – trying to make sure that we are using our resources in the best way. And that means making some uncomfortable decisions because the economist’s view isn’t just about whether or not a treatment is effective, but if we have the capacity to benefit from the available resources. So would £100 spent on medication for a heart failure patient be a better use of resources than putting that towards chemotherapy for somebody with breast cancer or implementing a screening programme for colorectal cancer or whatever the options are? These options are what we would call the opportunity cost of putting resources in one place rather than another.

‘If you were taking an individual view of medicine, you would say that if a treatment is effective, if it gives you a bit of extra life, it should be available. But what you don’t see in that are the people who are denied treatment elsewhere in the system. What is it that gives in the system? We know that there isn’t a limitless budget for healthcare and so something gives. And the fact that at that moment in time you can’t immediately identify that person, doesn’t mean that they are not there.’