Head of HEU, Hareth Al-Janabi, highlights upcoming research funded in the Health Economics Unit in 2024, PhD successes, comings and goings from the unit and challenges ahead.
New projects
In HEU we have broad research interests (Health Economics Unit – University of Birmingham), but with a particular focus on innovation within health economics. This can be seen in our work on challenging decision contexts, driving policy impact from health economic analysis, developing new health economic methods, and applying mixed methods to study resource allocation practices in the real world.
Over the course of the year, HEU staff have been successful in grant capture across a range of important topics including: economics of long-term condition management in Sri Lanka (Sue Jowett); use of economic evidence in public health (Hareth Al-Janabi); reproductive health policy (Louise Jackson), modelling the relationship between health and economic outcomes (Hamideh Mohtashami Borzadaran and Emma Frew) and health and economic analysis of multiple surgical interventions in factorial trials (Ray Oppong and Mark Monahan)….to name but a few.
PhD successes
PhDs are a key milestone in an academic’s career, forging relationships, interests, and skills that will often last a lifetime. This year, HEU staff Sam Perry, Mark Monahan, and Yibei Qu all passed their PhDs. Many congratulations to them – we wish them a long and happy academic career!
Welcome to HEU…and a fond farewell
We also welcomed a number of new staff to HEU: Igor Shagalov, Sedi Hosseini-Jebeli, Yibei Qu, Femi Aworinde, Sarah Moorlock, Arianna Morris Gouveia, and Jasmine Sachdeva and had two staff return to take-up NIHR training fellowships Lavanya Diwakar and Humera Sultan—clearly they couldn’t keep away! Sadly we also had to say farewell to Dee Wherton, Camille Allard, Becky Ince, Zainab Abdali, John Okon, and Melyda (who you may have seen has been running our very upbeat social media posts!) We thank them for their contributions and wish them all the best in their new roles.
Challenges on the horizon
2025 will set the economic and policy context for health and care in England for the next few years, through the Spending Review and NHS plan. For us in the HEU in Birmingham, and in the health economics world in general, it will be important to see how the Government’s new ‘mission focused’ agenda will translate into health. It looks like shifting resources to prevention, community settings, and digital will be key themes, and judging by recent economic pronouncements, ‘efficiency’, ‘priority setting’, and ‘evidence’ will also be at the heart of government thinking, highlighting the importance of bring a health economics lens to public sector decision-making.
On a more (and also less!) local level, we will be starting our new MSc in Health Economics and Health Policy at the University of Birmingham campus in Dubai. Driven by Louise Jackson’s hard work, we look forward to welcoming our first cohort in September and hopefully inspiring them to apply health economics and health policy to address the resource allocation challenges in the Middle East and beyond. The course is open for applications: Health Economics and Health Policy MSc / PGDip / PGCert (Dubai) – University of Birmingham.