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Content archived on 2024-06-18

European value of a quality adjusted life year

Objective

A major issue in cost effectiveness analysis is that of the value to place on a quality adjusted life year (QALY), commonly used as a measure of health effectiveness across Europe. This has come to the fore in several European countries, resulting from the creation of national health technology and pharmaceutical assessment agencies. Such agencies were established to make recommendations on technology adoption, addressing issues of affordability and sustainability of publicly funded health care systems. Recommendations are most often made on the basis of QALYs produced relative to costs incurred. Methods of estimating cost per QALY, based on rigorous decision analytic models, are now very sophisticated. However, 'threshold' values adopted (such as £20-40,000 per QALY above or below which a new therapy will be rejected or recommended for adoption in England) are essentially arbitrary, with little or no economic foundation.

This critical policy issue is reflected in growing interest across Europe in development of more sound methods to elicit such a value. The aim of this project would, therefore, be to develop robust methods to determine the monetary value of a QALY across a number of European Member States. This would be addressed in two ways: through 'modelling' such a value based on values of statistical lives currently used (or implicit values from adoption decisions in various fields) across Member States; and through survey research to test two methods of deriving a societal willingness-to-pay (WTP) based monetary value of a QALY. A European-level research initiative is required in the interests of subsidiarity and coherence. Different Member States will have different levels of affordability of QALY production. Country-specific values would lead to improve decision- making and efficiency. But it is crucial that WTP-based values generated have been rigorously tested across cultures using a consistent methodological approach.

Keywords

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Call for proposal

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FP6-2005-SSP-5-A
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

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STREP - Specific Targeted Research Project

Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE
EU contribution
No data
Total cost

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No data

Participants (13)

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