the potential to forgo social welfare gains through overreliance on cost effectivenesscost utility analyses in the evidence base for public health可能放弃通过依赖社会福利收益成本effectivenesscost效用分析的证据基础公共卫生.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Environmental and Public Health Volume 2009, Article ID 107927, 7 pages doi:10.1155/2009/107927 Research Article The Potential to Forgo Social Welfare Gains through Overreliance on Cost Effectiveness/Cost Utility Analyses in the Evidence Base for Public Health D. R. Cohen and N. Patel Health Economics and Policy Research Unit, University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, CF37 1DL, UK Correspondence should be addressed to D. R. Cohen, dcohen@glam.ac.uk Received 3 March 2009; Revised 18 August 2009; Accepted 11 November 2009 Recommended by Ulrich Laaser Economic evaluations of clinical treatments most commonly take the form of cost effectiveness or cost utility analyses. This is appropriate since the main—sometimes the only—benefit of such interventions is increased health. The majority of economic evaluations in public health, however, have also been assessed using these techniques when arguably cost benefit analyses would in many cases have been more appropriate, given its ability to take account of nonhealth benefits as well. An examination of the nonhealth benefits from a sample of studies featured in a recent review of economic evaluations in public health illustrates how overfocusing on cost effectiveness/cost utility analyses may lead to forgoing potential social welfare gains from programmes in public health. Prior to evaluation, programmes should be considered in terms of the potential importance of nonhealth benefits and where these are considerable would be better evaluated by more inclusive economic evaluation techniques. Copyright © 2009 D. R. Cohen and N. Patel. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the or