Should all patients be treated as equals or does society support prioritizing some patients over others?

Abstract:
The presentation will consider the Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF) in England as a case study to explore issues related to health care priority setting. The CDF has a budget of £200m (C$400m) to provide cancer patients with access to expensive treatments at the end of their life that would not otherwise be available. Money spent by the CDF could be spent on other treatments that would provide larger health benefits either to other cancer patients or other patients with other conditions. The presentation will discuss methods used to measure society’s preferences for prioritising some patient groups over others and present current evidence in support of the CDF.
Speaker:Dr Verity Watson is an economist whose field of expertise is applied welfare economics with a focus on methodological questions about developing and improving the methods used to elicit population values for non-market goods such as health and health care. Dr Watson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Health Economics Research Unit (HERU) at the University of Aberdeen in the UK and leads the Methods of Benefit Valuation research theme in HERU.
This lecture will also be broadcast online. See http://spph.ubc.ca/seminar-series/grand-rounds/details/ for technical information.Room B151, School of Population and Public Health, 2206 East Mall, Vancouver