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Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)

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Health and Wellbeing

Our research examines the nature of health & wellbeing, how it should be measured & evaluated for public policy purposes, and the fair distribution of health resources.

"Dying Well": Enacting Medical Ethics

This interdisciplinary collaboration between the actors and artists of the theatre group, [Foreign Affairs], academics from the Schnitzler Digital Edition Project and the Health Humanities Centre was aided by a UCL Grand Challenge of Human Wellbeing Small Grant. It consisted of a theatre production and a symposium, exploring the theme of ‘dying well’ in Schnitzler’s medical drama Professor Bernhardi, where the eponymous Jewish doctor prevents a Catholic priest from giving the last rites to a patient who is unaware that she is dying. Performances ran from 23-25 Sept 2015, with a symposium on 26 September 2015.

Valuing Health: Wellbeing, Freedom and Suffering

This international conference in June 2015 examined Dan Hausman's newly published book Valuing Health: Well-being, Freedom and Suffering. A team of commentators, and the author himself, addressed themes raised by the book, including:

  • Definitions of health, and why they matter;
  • The relationship between health and well-being;
  • The contribution of phenomenology to understanding and evaluating health states;
  • How to measure health for public policy purposes;
  • Justice in the allocation of scarce health resources.

A selection of the papers were published in Public Health Ethics in 2016.

The UCL/KCL Social Values in Health Group

Building on a history of joint work on Social Values and Health Priority Setting, the UCL/KCL Social Values Group meets regularly in term time to explore values challenges in the design and prioritisation of health care services. Recent outputs include forthcoming papers in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and the Kennedy Institute Ethics Journal, an Advice Document to NICE on revising its Social Value Judgements, and various consultation responses.

Examples of consultancy work on health and wellbeing

  • Shepley Orr, Steve Morris and Jo Wolff were commissioned by Pfizer to consider the question of What Values Should Count in HTA for New Medicines under Value Based Pricing. The resulting report examines a number of potential values, and ranks them on a traffic light system for inclusion or exclusion.
  • James Wilson and David Hunter produced a report for the Nuffield Council on Bioethics on Ethical Issues raised by Hyperexpensive Treatments.
  • Jonathan Wolff and Shepley Orr were commissioned by the Inter-Departmental Group on the Value of Life and Health to provide a report on the value of life and health for the purposes of public policy decision-making. The central questions addressed concern how the quality adjusted life-year (QALY), used in health decision making relates to the value of preventing a fatality (VPF) uses in transport, and when it is, and is not, appropriate to use this values.