As you’ll see below, Dr Elsa Marques from the School of Social and Community Medicine is an expert evaluator. She recently helped us out by coordinating our team of evaluators at the Festival of Nature – no mean feat considering the horrible weather that weekend!
Medical science is always advancing, but alongside the development of new interventions (whether they’re new drugs, technologies or procedures), there’s a need to think about how they can be used in our healthcare system. Clinicians test whether a particular intervention is an improvement on current practice by setting up a randomised control trial; statisticians can then work out from this trial what is the most effective treatment. Health economists, such as Elsa, go one step further and collect all the costs that are associated with the different interventions – not only the NHS related costs but also other costs such as social services, the patients’ time off work and time off their leisure activities. They then evaluate whether the effect that a new intervention might bring is worth the extra cost both for the NHS and society. One of Elsa’s current projects is looking at whether giving additional anaesthesia during total hip and knee replacements will improve long term outcomes after surgery. Hopefully patients will begin physiotherapy faster and resume their normal activities sooner so in the long run it may be a cost-effective treatment option.
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