Good intention/bad practice?

As part of the newly established Statistics/Health Economics seminars that our group is now organising at UCL, we are preparing a very exciting event for December 15th (so basically just a couple of weeks away).

A few of us got to talk about several general issues and we came up with the idea of a one-day workshop exploring issues around the setting of cost-effectiveness thresholds in economic evaluations. One thing led to another and we decided to try and ambush Mike Paulden (who’s done quite a bit of work on this) on his way back to England for the Christmas holiday (I would like to take full credit for this, but I think it was James to suggest it) $-$ thus the probably unusual timing for this!

As if this wasn’t enough, we’d also taken advantage of Chris McCabe’s ability for finding catchy titles and sort-of asked him to suggest one $-$ I think the end result was brilliant, so we named the workshop NICE and the cost-effectiveness thresholds: Can good intentions compensate for bad practice?

The semi-final programme is available on the website $-$ but the plan is to keep it as informal as possible, with lots of time for discussion during and after the talks. In addition, I will also talk about how including risk-aversion in utility functions may be linked to issues around the choice of cost-effectiveness threshold (if at all!). My talk will probably be (much) less “mature” than everybody else’s $-$ I have been thinking about this for some time, but never had the time to fully clarify my thoughts… Hopefully I’ll be forced to produce something vaguely reasonable in the next few days…

I should say that participation is free, but the space is limited, so if you are reading this and think you may be interested, please drop me an email, so we know what to expect!