Measuring and Valuing Health

Explore how and why we decide what drugs and treatments should be funded

Healthcare systems around the world are increasingly under pressure to fund new drugs, treatments and other healthcare interventions.

On this course, you’ll learn how health outcome measuring can help us to make more informed decisions about where to spend our limited healthcare budgets.

You’ll find out how patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are developed and calculated, and learn how they can be used to compare treatment benefits in practice.

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?.

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?.

• 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.