LSTM’s seminar series continued today with a presentation by Professor Louis Niessen, LSTM’s Chair of Health Economics and part of LSTM’s Centre for Applied Health Research and Delivery (CAHRD) , The presentation, entitled “Developing Health Economics through the Centre for Applied Health Research and Delivery, LSTM” was introduced by CAHRD director Professor Bertie Squire.
Professor Niessen started by outlining a vision of how to develop health economics at LSTM, with the overlapping themes of research, capacity strengthening, research training education and knowledge translation into policy and practice. He sketched changing societal health goals, promoting both health and equity in health distribution. There is a shift through history from opinion-based, to evidence-based and then to value-based choices in health, starting with doctors traditionally making choices based on clinical judgement. This has evolved the last three decades to the use of evidence, including cost-effectiveness information to make value-based choices in national policy making.
He showed the field of health economics performing epidemiological and economic research analysis at clinical and population level, evaluating different options in health intervention programming. He showed examples of health economics in action and looked at how value and efficiency could be evaluated. He illustrated some policy making preferences for both efficiency and equity in health provision.
He flagged potential training opportunities at LSTM in the field of health economics, how knowledge can be translated into policy and practice, and how LSTM research groups can interact with himself in his new position at LSTM.
Professor Niessen then answered questions from students and staff in the auditorium including discussing the potential value of elimination of conditions and the cultural and other country difference that might lead to different societal goals.
Professor Niessen, was appointed as LSTM’s Chair in Health Economics in October this year. Prior to LSTM he was an associate professor at the Department of International Health and a Professor of Public Health Economics at the University of East Anglia He was a Founding Director of the NIH-funded Centre for Chronic Diseases at ICDDRB in Bangladesh. He worked previously in health economics and public health based at the Erasmus University Rotterdam as a senior scientist and in district health programmes in Nepal, Peru and Tanzania.