Two New Papers on EQ-5D-5L Valuation in Ireland

OHE’s Koonal Shah and Nancy Devlin are co-authors on two new papers focusing on the valuation of the EQ-5D-5L in Ireland.

In Ireland, the importance of health technology assessment has been embraced for some time. National bodies such as the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics and the Health Information and Quality Authority are involved in economic evaluations. The latter publishes guidance on the conduct of evaluations in Ireland and recommends the use of cost-utility analysis as its preferred evaluation type. Until now, however, no national value set for the generation of utility weights has been published for Ireland.

OHE has collaborated with colleagues from NUI Galway and Queen’s University Belfast to develop an Irish value set for the EQ-5D-5L, a widely used measure of health outcome. The value set study was led by Ciaran O’Neill and followed the international standard protocol for EQ-5D-5L valuation studies developed by the EuroQol Group.

Two papers arising from the collaboration have recently been published. The first paper, published in PharmacoEconomics, is a scientific report of the Irish value set study. It provides a detailed description of the methodology, including the use of a hybrid model to analyse preference data elicited via time trade-off and discrete choice experiment tasks. It also presents the value set, explaining that greater disutility was attached to anxiety/depression than to the other four dimensions. Indeed, it appears that people in Ireland attach more importance to anxiety/depression than do people in other countries where similar studies have been undertaken.

The second paper, published in Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, examines how adherence to particular religious beliefs influences attitudes to euthanasia, and how attitudes to euthanasia influences people’s willingness to assign worse than dead (WTD) values to health states. It reports that religiosity was a significant determinant of attitudes to euthanasia, and attitudes to euthanasia were a significant determinant of the likelihood of assigning WTD values. The paper adds to the growing literature on the relationship between religious beliefs and health state values, including qualitative work undertaken by UAE University in collaboration with OHE.

Both papers are available open access. Further outputs from this programme of work will be made available over the coming months.

For more information about OHE’s research on valuing health outcomes, contact Koonal Shah.

Citations

Barry, L., Hobbins, A., Kelleher, D., Shah, K., Devlin, N., Ramos Goñi, J.M. and O’Neill, C., 2018. Euthanasia, religiosity and the valuation of health states: results from an Irish EQ5D5L valuation study and their implications for anchor values. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 16(152). DOI

Hobbins, A., Barry, L., Kelleher, D., Shah, K., Devlin, N., Ramos Goñi, J.M. and O’Neill, C., 2018. Utility values for health states in Ireland: a value set for the EQ-5D-5L. PharmacoEconomics. DOI

Related research

Devlin, N., Shah, K., Feng, Y., Mulhern, B. and van Hout, B., 2018. Valuing health-related quality of life: an EQ-5D-5L value set for England. Health Economics, 27(1), pp.7-22. DOI | RePEc

Elbarazi, I., Devlin, N.J., Katsaiti, M.S., Papadimitropoulos, E.A., Shah, K.K. and Blair, I., 2017. The effect of religion on the perception of health states among adults in the United Arab Emirates: a qualitative study. BMJ Open, 7, e016969. DOI