Disability, income and quality of life outcomes for older adults
Project theme: Methods development
Standard measures of health gain used to value the benefits of interventions for economic evaluation are often claimed not to be sufficient for all interventions, particularly in social care. Evidence of the benefits of social care interventions may span different outcome measures including impacts on health, wellbeing and capabilities. We know that different interventions may also impact on eligibility for public support services, which itself further influences the health and wellbeing of both patients and their families, and the degree of care that must be provided informally.
These impacts are all inter-related. They need to be understood and valued in a consistent way to accurately reflect the gains from different interventions or policies. Methods to do this are challenging. The aim of this project is to start to develop methods that aim to achieve this. It will do so by constructing a joint statistical model that represents these relationships between different outcome measures and impacts at the same time, but whilst maintaining a focus on results that can be used directly in economic evaluation to value new interventions and reflect their opportunity cost consistently.
Aims
- to develop methods for valuing the benefits of social care interventions that simultaneously accounts for the multi-dimensional outcomes relevant to social care for individuals and their families (including carers), social care services, payments, benefits and income.
- to develop methods that can express the benefit of social care interventions in terms of health outcomes, broader measures of wellbeing and monetary value.
- to illustrate and provide preliminary testing of methods using data from” Understanding Society”, focussing on the older population.
Project Team
Steve Pudney, Monica Hernandez, Ruth Hancock and Allan Wailoo