Too important to ignore

Excerpt

Some 10 years ago now, the US Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine published their influential guidelines for economic evaluations.[1] The book in which these guidelines are laid down starts with an impressive account of the welfare economic roots of economic evaluation. Based on these roots, it is argued that economic evaluations should normally take a societal perspective. This implies that all costs and effects should be included in an analysis, regardless of who experiences them. In line with this perspective, the US Panel makes an important statement when it encourages analysts “to think broadly about the people affected by the intervention and begin to include health-related quality-of-life effects of significant others in sensitivity analyses when they are important.”[1] The Panel thus indicates that healthcare interventions may affect others besides patients and that these ‘significant others’ should therefore be considered in an analysis whenever relevant and important. An important and laudable recommendation. …