UCL Department of Political Science

Sam Littlejohns of MHP Communications, a consultancy firm working on health policy issues amongst others, has written a blog about the move towards including social value judgements in priority setting decisions, where previously cost-effectiveness dominated.  Sam suggests that 'Social value judgements could be poised to become all the rage'.  The article points to our project as the only initiative around currently to be tackling the issues. 

We have had much interest in the project from the media over recent months, with several articles being published in the UK media and one in a Portuguese newspaper.

In September, UCL and King's hosted a two day summer school on Social Values and Clinical Commissioning in the UK, attended by health policy practitioners and researchers. Clinical commissioning groups in the UK will soon acquire responsibility for commissioning health services for their local populations, and when they do, they will face familiar problems in healthcare priority setting, including the tension between meeting need and maximising benefit, identifying exceptional cases and securing overall fairness. In addition, a new value-based pricing regime is due to come into effect for pharmaceuticals in the UK in 2014.

Several lead members of the Social Values research network hosted a panel session at the Health Technology Assessment international conference 2012, in Bilbao on 25 June.

UCL hosted a conference in February this year on the challenge of how to set priorities in health fairly, at which presentations were given by several UCL members of the social values network. Albert Weale presented on ‘Social Value for Money in Health Care’; Sarah Clark presented on ‘Interpreting Social Values in Health Care’; and Katharina Kieslich presented the case of ‘Priority Setting in Germany’.

Sarah Clark, one of the UK researchers in the network, recently attended the first HTA AsiaLink conference in Cha-Am, Thailand.

A special edition of the Journal of Health Organisation and Management on the topic of social values and health priority setting was published in May. The special issue was edited by and comprised entirely of papers contributed by members of the Social Values network.

An international conference on Social Values in Health Priority Setting was held on 17-18 February in London. The aim of the conference was to begin to scope out the variety of values-based challenges and approaches faced by health policy makers in different countries, and to develop a research agenda.

8th Annual Meeting of Health Technology Assessment international: Rio de Janeiro, 27-29 June, 2011.

A follow up workshop on Social Values and Health Priority Setting will be held at the HTAi 2011 conference in Rio de Janeiro.