On the 20th January 2016, CLAHRC WM hosted the first inter-CLAHRC Health Economics for Service Delivery Research workshop at Kings College London’s Strand Campus. The event aimed to allow CLAHRCs to share their plans and activities in developing the methodology of health economics for service delivery research, and highlight any particular challenges and methodological issues.

The group was welcomed by chair John de Pury, Assistant Director of Policy at Universities UK, and nine of the thirteen national CLAHRC initiatives presented their current and planned work. Following this, Prof Richard Lilford, Director of CLAHRC West Midlands, led group discussions on the key domains that emerged from these presentations. Common themes included costs issues, such as identifying costs and threshold volumes; environmental impacts, such as the distribution of permanent cost effects and knock-on; preference issues, such as capturing all the utilities; conceptualising the problem, defining both the intervention and the alternative, boundary effects and modelling; epistemology, including multiple patient end points, context and complexity; the cost effectiveness of cost effectiveness analysis; and uptake and dissemination issues, i.e. what do decision makers need and how much analysis is enough.

John de Pury summarised the discussions and the group identified a number of ways to move forward with the health economics for service delivery research, including organising a symposium on the subject with a possible output, and creating a network or working group to refine the domains and establish a plan to move forward.