Jon Sussex was a keynote speaker at the Capita conference on competition in health care held in June, where the audience was primarily from the NHS. Jon’s presentation summarised the state of provider competition in the NHS to date as well as national and international evidence about the impact of competition on quality.

OHE was active in several forums in June. This blog post summarises the highlights.

Competition in the NHS

Jon Sussex was a keynote speaker at the Capita conference on competition in health care held in June, where the audience was primarily from the NHS. Jon’s presentation summarised the state of provider competition in the NHS to date as well as national and international evidence about the impact of competition on quality. Competition would be important for some services, Jon noted, but unimportant for others. Assessing the feasibility of competition is essential using, for example, the framework developed by the OHE Commission on NHS Competition.

OHE at HESG: Health Care Decision Making, Hospital Market Concentration

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 2014. Two OHE papers were discussed at the most recent HESG meeting.

1. A paper by Karla Hernandez-Villafuerte and Jon Sussex that sets out a preliminary model intended to characterise the behaviour of decision makers in the health sector who must make choices based on budget constraints set by government or another health system authority. Specifically, the model focuses on the options available when use of new health technology is mandated.

See also the recent OHE Research Paper Opportunity costs of implementing NICE decisions in NHS Wales.

2. A paper co-authored by Yan Feng, Michele Pistollato, Anita Charlesworth, Nance Devlin, Carol Propper and Jon Sussex that assesses the relationship between market concentration in hospital care and health gains as reported by patients following primary hip replacement surgery. This research is a joint project of OHE and the Nuffield Trust.

June Publications

In June, OHE welcomed two new members to its team, Dr Amanda Chapman and Grace Marsden. Shortly after beginning her position at OHE, a paper on which Amanda is lead author appeared online in Applied Health Economics and Health Policy. The article is based on Amanda’s work on medical devices while at the University of Birmingham and assesses the effect of NICE’s Medical Technologies Evaluation Programme over its first three years of operation[1].

Also just published online is an article by Karla Hernandez-Villafuerte on age and inequalities in access to care[2].

To inquire further, please contact the relevant OHE team member by visiting the About Us section of the website.

[1] Chapman, A., Taylor, C.A. and Girling, A.J., 2014. Are the UK systems of innovation and evaluation of medical devices compatible? The role of NICE’s Medical Technology Evaluation Programme (MTEP). Applied Health Economics and Health Policy. DOI: 10.1007/s40258-014-0104-y.

[2] Hernandez-Villafuerte, K., 2014. El adulto mayor y la universalidad de la salud: Análisis de desigualdad basado en una comparación entre los diferentes grupos de edad. Estudios de Economia Aplicada. [Available in Spanish only.]