Measuring and Valuing Health

Who is the course for?

This course is designed for anyone interested in how and why choices about drugs and treatments have been made.

It is ideal learning for anyone considering a career in healthcare, local decision-making or academia.

If you wish to take your learning further, the University of Sheffield’s other Masters degrees and short courses address areas such as health economics, public health and international healthcare technology assessment.

You can find out more about this subject in Dr Katherine Stevens’ post for the FutureLearn blog: “How do we make decisions in healthcare about which drugs and treatments to fund?.

What topics will you cover?

The course focuses on two different types of measures, asking how they’re developed and calculated, and how they’re used by decision makers in practice:

Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs): which are measures completed by the patients themselves, about their health, symptoms, functioning, well-being or satisfaction with treatment.

Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs): which compare the benefits of different treatment options, based on the quality and quantity of life they yield.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to…

Discuss what health means and how to measure its impact on quality of life.

Evaluate how to develop and use patient reported outcome measures including their limitations in decision-making.

Calculate QALYs in simple examples to arrive at values which can be used to compare treatment benefits.

Perform a time trade off to develop an understanding of how this method can be used to value health states and generate preference weights.

Debate who should value our health. Should it be patients, health professionals or the general public and should this be different for children’s health?

Compare where QALYs are used in healthcare decision-making worldwide and discuss the merits of this method compared to those used where you live.