Workshop Cost Effectiveness

Workshop Cost Effectiveness: an introduction

Silvia Evers and André Ament

The problem of increasing health expenditures throughout the world has been a focus of the public debate for years. In order to allocate scarce resources scientific information is needed in which both an evaluation is done of the costs and effects of an intervention, preferably at a societal level. Economic evaluation is a technique that is developed to assess costs and benefits of alternative health strategies to provide a decision-makers framework.

The target of the workshop is to provide an introduction of the approaches of economic evaluation with a focus on interventions in the field of health promotion. The field of economic evaluation will be considered against the background of evidence-based medicine. In this workshop the necessity of performing economic evaluation will be discussed, the methods of performing economic evaluation will be lectured, including the boundaries and limitations of economic evaluation.

The workshop is conducted in a 4 hours session. The session will consist of two short lectures in which the theoretical aspects of economic evaluation are considered. After the lectures small working groups work through the application with the case of an aid. The case study is followed by a presentation of the results and the feedback from the organiser. In the closing of the workshop we would like to address the use of economic evaluation in daily practice of health promotion. For this final session we would encourage to bring (if relevant) your own proposals in which you would like to include an economic evaluation.

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