Is There Societal Support for an End of Life Premium?

OHE’s Koonal Shah gave a presentation on the evidence of societal support for an end of life premium at the Pharmaccess Leaders Forum in Milan on 5th May.

On 5th May 2017, OHE’s Koonal Shah attended and presented at the Pharmaccess Leaders Forum in Milan, Italy. His presentation examined the extent of societal support for an end of life premium – that is, the extent to which society places special value on health gains for patients with short life expectancy.

Koonal began by providing background on QALY weighting and the policy context in England, focusing on NICE’s appraisals of life-extending end of life treatments and recent changes to the Cancer Drugs Fund. He then presented the findings of a review of the empirical literature on end of life-related preferences (featured in a previous blog).

The presentation concluded with a discussion of recent additions to the evidence base that have sought to address some of the limitations and ambiguities in the earlier research on this topic. Koonal highlighted three innovative studies led by researchers in the Netherlands, Denmark and Scotland. The latter was a focus of a London Health Economics Group seminar hosted by OHE in November.

Related publications include:

• Devlin, N., Lorgelly, P., 2017. QALYs as a measure of value in cancer. Journal of Cancer Policy, 11, pp.19-25. [available to download free-of-charge]
• Shah, K.K., 2016. Is willingness to pay higher for cancer prevention and treatment? Journal of Cancer Policy, 11, pp.60-64. [available to download free-of-charge]
• Shah, K.K., 2016. Does society place special value on end of life treatments? In: Round, J. ed. Care at the end of life: An economic perspective. Cham: Springer. pp. 155-166. [available here]
• Shah, K.K., Tsuchiya, A. and Wailoo, A.J., 2015. Valuing health at the end of life: A stated preference discrete choice experiment. Social Science & Medicine, 124, pp.48-56. [available to download free-of-charge]

For more information on OHE’s research on social values, contact Koonal Shah.