CERGAS Seminar "Happiness, wealth and capabilities: does it matter how we conceptualise and measure quality of life?"

Public health programmes tend to be complex and may combine social strategies with aspects of empowerment, capacity building and knowledge across sectors. The nature of the programmes means that some effects are likely to occur outside the healthcare sector; this breadth impacts on the choice of health and non-health outcomes to measure and value in an economic evaluation.
Employing conventional outcome measures such as QALYs and DALYs in evaluations of public health has been questioned. There are concerns that such measures are too narrow, overlook important dimensions of programme effect and, thus, lead to such interventions being undervalued. This issue is of particular importance for low-income and middle-income countries, which face considerable budget constraints, yet deliver a large proportion of health activities within public health programmes. The need to develop and test outcome measures, which include broader measures of quality of life, has given impetus to the development of a variety of new, holistic approaches, including Sen’s capability framework and measures of subjective wellbeing. Despite their promise, these approaches have not yet been widely applied, perhaps because they present significant methodological challenges.
This presentation will outline the methodological challenges and practical opportunities for the identification, measurement and valuation of broader outcomes for the evaluation of public health interventions in low-income and middle-income countries.

Speaker:

Giulia Greco is an Associate Professor in Health and Wellbeing Economics and Co-Director of the Global Health Economics Centre (GHECO) at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). She obtained an undergraduate degree at Universita’ Bocconi and an MSc at the LSE. She joined the LSHTM in 2006, where she completed her PhD on a multidimensional index based on Sen's Capability Approach to assess women's wellbeing in rural Malawi. Her research focuses on understanding the value of health and quality of life, and the measurement of broader outcomes in the evaluation of public health programmes, including capabilities and subjective wellbeing. She contributed to the UK Wellbeing and Policy report and worked with the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All. Her current projects include research on climate change and maternal health, adolescent wellbeing, and mental health in humanitarian settings across sub-Saharan Africa. She is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and member of the Executive Council of the Human Development and Capabilities Association. She is currently based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Link zoom:

https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/97195874923?pwd=2BxtH47jloiyce8dh9LU1ebwotNEMB.1 

Meeting ID:

971 9587 4923

Passcode:

179521

Lunch at the end of the meeting: for those willing to participate in person, click here before the 17th of September.