OHE at HESG: Informal Caregiving and Valuing End-of-Life Care

The Health Economists’ Study Group (HESG) was founded in 1972 to support and promote the work of health economists. Its members are from academic, commercial, and government settings. The purpose of HESG is to transmit knowledge and ideas, ranging from the theoretical to very practical policy issues.

The Health Economists’ Study Group (HESG) was founded in 1972 to support and promote the work of health economists. Its members are from academic, commercial, and government settings. The purpose of HESG is to transmit knowledge and ideas, ranging from the theoretical to very practical policy issues.

HESG meets twice a year, most recently in June 2013, where three of OHE's economists participated.

• Sarah Karlsberg Schaffer’s recent OHE Research Paper, The effect of free personal care for the elderly on informal caregiving, was discussed. This research outlines the importance of informal caregiving—by family and friends—and explores the effect of state subsidies on such care. It finds a synergistic effect, with informal caregiving increasing, rather than being replaced by, state-sponsored care.

• Koonal Shah’s research on valuing health at the end of life also was discussed at the HESG meeting. Also available as an OHE Research paper, Valuing health at the end of life: A stated preference discrete choice experiment investigates the extent to which the policy of giving higher priority to life-extending, end-of-life treatments than to other types of treatment is consistent with the stated preferences of members of the general public in England and Wales. The paper is co-authored by Aki Tsuchiya, Arne Risa Hole and Allan Wailoo.

In addition, Koonal was a discussant for a paper, entitled The value of time at the end of life: Anchoring in economic evaluation by Philip Kinghorn and Joanna Coast, University of Birmingham.  Yan Feng chaired a panel that discussed a paper by Claire Simons, Oliver Rivero-Arias, Ly-Mee Yu and Judit Simon, all from University of Oxford, entitled “Missing data in the health related quality of life EQ-5D-3L instrument: Should we impute individual domains or the actual index?” She also was a discussant for “Patients’ choice and hospital quality competition: Unintended impacts of the signals”, a paper co-authored by Tommaso Gabrieli (University of Reading), Mireia Jofre-Bonet (City University), and Alister J. McGuire (LSE).

Sarah, Koonal and Yan each can be contacted by clicking on the the hyperlinks attached to their names, above.