OHE Welcomes Two New Economists: Bernarda Zamora and Patricia Cubi-Molla

OHE are pleased to announce the appointments of Bernarda Zamora and Patricia Cubi-Molla.

The Office of Health Economics are pleased to announce the appointment of two new Economists: Bernarda Zamora and Patricia Cubi-Molla.

Bernarda’s areas of expertise include econometric modelling of health statistics at patient level and international health statistics at country level.

Bernarda has completed research on the impact of provider diversity in the NHS on several aspects of quality measured from patient experience surveys and from hospital emergency admissions. She has also undertaken quantitative work to compare different dimensions of quality of provision of acute services between incumbent NHS organisations and new independent sector treatment centres. The analysis of this data generated estimates of the effects of provider type on quality, according to emergency readmission and different indexes of patient experience, whilst controlling for patient characteristics. The results have been published in the project report and in different peer reviewed publications, including Journal of Health Economics, International Journal of Public and Private Healthcare Management and Economics, Journal of Health Services Research & Policy, and Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics.

Bernarda joins OHE from the European Commission, where she has worked as a Reviewer and a Senior Research Fellow since 2011. Prior to working at the European Commission Bernarda held a variety of positions within Spanish and British academia. Bernarda holds a PhD in Economics from the University Carlos III of Madrid and a Certificate in Quantitative Finance from Fitch Learning. She also has an MA in Labour and Education Economics (University Carlos III, Spain), and a BSc in Economics from University of Zaragoza (Spain).

For further information, including details of Bernarda’s past projects and publications, click here.

Patricia’s main research interests include: health-related quality of life measures, subjective well-being, cost-effectiveness thresholds, estimation of health-related outcomes, health policy evaluation, ordered choice models and theory of preferences.

She is also completing a piece of research examining the issue of adaptation to health states. The existence of adaptation may potentially explain the disparity between the valuation of the impact of a hypothetical specific condition on health, and that of someone who experiences it. Overall the empirical analysis finds that duration of an illness has a positive impact on self-assessed health.  This positive relationship also holds when looking at specific chronic conditions, but it is only statistically significant for a subset of those. This research paper has been presented at several conferences, including the European Conference on Health Economics, the American Society of Health Economists and the Health Economists’ Study Group.

Patricia joins OHE from City University London where she has worked a Lecturer in Economics since June 2009. Prior to joining City, Patricia undertook a PhD in Quantitative Economics at the University of Alicante. She holds an MSc in Quantitative Economics and BSc in Mathematics, also from the University of Alicante.

For further information, including details of Patricia’s past projects and publications, click here.