Work by Sarah Karlsberg Schaffer (OHE), Jon Sussex (RAND Europe), Dyfrig Hughes (Bangor University) and Nancy Devlin (OHE) has recently been published in BMC Health Services Research. Research by OHE’s Sarah Karlsberg Schaffer and Professor Nancy Devlin, in collaboration with…
Work by Sarah Karlsberg Schaffer (OHE), Jon Sussex (RAND Europe), Dyfrig Hughes (Bangor University) and Nancy Devlin (OHE) has recently been published in BMC Health Services Research.
Research by OHE’s Sarah Karlsberg Schaffer and Professor Nancy Devlin, in collaboration with Jon Sussex (RAND Europe) and Dyfrig Hughes (Bangor University), has recently been published in BMC Health Services Research.
The paper, entitled “Opportunity Costs and Local Health Service Spending Decisions – a Qualitative Study from Wales”, focusses on identifying what, in practice, is foregone when the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommends a new cost-increasing technology for mandatory use in the NHS as part of its Technology Appraisal (TA) programme.
The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with Finance and Medical Directors at Local Health Boards (LHBs) in Wales, covering prioritisation processes as well as methods of financing NICE TAs and other financial shocks at each LHB.
They found that the financial impact of NICE TAs is generally anticipated and planned for in advance and the majority of LHBs have contingency funds available to cope with these and other financial shocks within-period.
The authors also found that efficiency savings (defined as reductions in costs with no assumed reductions in quality) were a source of funds for cost pressures of all kinds and that service displacements were not linkable to particular NICE TAs. On occasion, unexpected increased demand for resources was met with increased expenditure, meaning that the Welsh Government has explicitly or implicitly acted as the funder of last resort. These results suggest that the opportunity cost of NICE TAs may be very difficult to quantify and may lie outside of the health system.
Access the paper here [Open Access].
Sarah will also be presenting the work at the EuHEA conference in Hamburg in July 2016.
An error has occurred, please try again later.
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!