The economics of public health

Contact: Prof Julia Fox-Rushby

Public health interventions challenge the typical approaches to the economic evaluation of healthcare interventions, many of which are derived from the evaluation of pharmaceutical interventions. Public health interventions are often characterised by being multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral, with costs and benefits accrued by health services, local authorities, employers and society more generally. In addition to this, many public health interventions are associated with a stream of benefits which are accrued over a long-period, with some short-term initial gains, followed by improvements in longer-term outcomes (e.g. smoking cessation results in reductions in admissions in the short-term and improvements in mortality in the longer-term). Finally, the evidence base on public health interventions is often limited, due to practical difficulties in conducting tightly controlled, comparative studies of such interventions.

HERG has a number of active research interests in public health, including research related to physical activity, smoking cessation and methods for the evaluation of public health interventions.