Measuring and Valuing Health

Explore how and why we decide what drugs and treatments should be funded

Healthcare systems around the world are increasingly under pressure to fund new drugs, treatments and other healthcare interventions.

On this course, you’ll learn how health outcome measuring can help us to make more informed decisions about where to spend our limited healthcare budgets.

You’ll find out how patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are developed and calculated, and learn how they can be used to compare treatment benefits in practice.

This course is designed for anyone interested in how and why choices about drugs and treatments have been made.

It is ideal learning for anyone considering a career in healthcare, local decision-making or academia.

If you wish to take your learning further, the University of Sheffield’s other Masters degrees and short courses address areas such as health economics, public health and international healthcare technology assessment.

You can find out more about this subject in Dr Katherine Stevens’ post for the FutureLearn blog: “How do we make decisions in healthcare about which drugs and treatments to fund?.

• Measuring Health: Why and How?
• Welcome to the course
• The challenge of measuring health
• Patient Reported Outcome Measures
• Wrapping up the week
• Valuing Health: Quality Adjusted Life Years and Decision Making
• Welcome to Week 2
• Decision-making in healthcare
• Quality Adjusted Life Years
• Putting the Q into QALY
• QALYs and decision-making
• Wrapping up the week
• Further viewing (optional)
• Utility Measures in Practice
• Welcome to Week 3
• The EQ-5D
• Whose values should we use?
• Utility measures in practice
• Wrapping up the course