OHE is Pleased to Host Four MSc Students for 2016

OHE is pleased to be working with four MSc students this year. The students, from City University and the London School of Economics, will spend three months at OHE being supervised and trained by various members of the OHE team whilst completing their MSc theses.

OHE is pleased to be working with four MSc students this summer. The students, from City University and the London School of Economics, will spend three months at OHE being supervised and trained by various members of the OHE team whilst writing their MSc theses.

Aina Pi, who is studying MSc Health Economics at City University London, is working on a project to identify the determinants and correlates of patient satisfaction with the community mental health care provided in England.

In recent decades, patient-reported satisfaction with services has been seen as an increasingly important indicator of the quality of health care. Patients’ experience is hypothesised to be determined by patients’ sociodemographic and clinical characteristics but there is still a lack of knowledge on what defines it. Aina will perform a detailed empirical analysis of the Community Mental Health Survey for the 2010-2013 period, which is completed by over 13,000 adult users of English mental health services per year. The survey is conducted by the Care Quality Commission to monitor the services’ performance and improve patient experience. In this project, Aina will analyse how satisfaction ratings vary depending on respondents’ characteristics, and assess which are the main drivers of satisfaction variability. The results will provide information about the quality of services and contribute to improving mental health care services in the community across trusts in England.

For more information on this project please contact Sarah Karlsberg Schaffer.

Rishub Keelara, an MSc student from the London School of Economics, is working on a project relating to the valuation of health for children, using the generic health-related quality of life instrument: the EQ-5D, and the youth-version of this instrument (EQ-5D-Y).

Currently, national value set studies all obtain health preferences relating to adults. The aim of this project is to evaluate data that have been collected as part of a multi-country study (UK, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands) to assess whether differences in valuations arise when people are asked to take the perspective of an adult when completing the valuation task (the norm) versus being asked to think of a 10-year-old child. Through this project Rishub will evaluate whether and how preferences for health in children differ, and how these differences might relate to respondents’ background characteristics or demographics. This could have a profound impact on our understanding of health preferences for children, and consequently of how health interventions that relate to children are evaluated, for example through cost-effectiveness analysis.

For more information on this project please contact Amanda Cole.

Reeta Hill, who is studying for a MSc Health Economics at City University London, is working on a project which investigates the relationship between health-related quality of life measures (EQ-5D-3L and EQ-VAS) and measures of well-being (ONS-4) and capabilities (ICECAP-A and ASCOT-SCT4), for Parkinson’s Disease (PD) patients.

There is much interest from policy makers who are taking a broader view on how factors beyond health may help provide information on a patient’s health status and consequently on decisions about pricing and reimbursement. Analysing how these measures are related is particularly important within disease groups, where some measures may be better than others at capturing the impact of a specific disease on a patient. Reeta will explore data from a sample of individuals (about 200 respondents) with a diagnosis of PD in the UK (2011). Through this research, Reeta will contribute to the debate that raises fundamental questions as to what each measure is capturing, how it adds value to policy, and consequently whether we should consider the different measures as potential substitutes or complements.

For more information on this project please contact Patricia Cubi-Molla.

Russell Devolder is also studying for a MSc Health Economics at City University London. He is working on a project to analyse the delay in hospital discharges.

According to a recent report from the National Audit Office, there has been an increase in hospital bed days by patients with a delayed discharge since 2013. The main drivers for this increase are the number of days spent waiting for a package of home care or for a nursing home. Russell is analysing the variability in the length of stay and its relationship with delayed discharge using Adult Inpatient Surveys, and complementary administrative data on hospital characteristics.  His analysis will identify the main factors behind the variability in delayed discharge across hospitals and regions in England. His results will complement the recent report by the National Audit Office, and could add new explanatory factors to help resolve a long-standing issue; the project has the potential to be impactful given calls for a revision of the “discharge from hospital policy” and for a better integration between hospitals and social care.

For more information on this project please contact Bernarda Zamora.

OHE has successfully hosted a number of MSc students over the years, and we undertake the work as part of our remit to build capacity in health economics and increase both the knowledge and evidence base. Examples of previous students’ work include:

• Brockis, E., Marsden, G., Cole, A., and Devlin, N. A Review of NICE Methods Across Health Technology Assessment Programmes: Differences, Justifications and Implications. OHE Research Paper 16/03. London: Office of Health Economics.
• Cubí-Mollá, P., De Vries, J. and Devlin, N., 2014. A study of the relationship between health and subjective well-being in Parkinson’s disease patients. Value in Health, 17(4), pp.372-379.
• Shah, K., 2009. Severity of illness and priority setting in healthcare: A review of the literature. Health Policy, 93, pp.77–84.