End of life

The NICE Supplementary Guidance, first issued in 2009 and now enshrined in the Institute’s methods guide, specifies conditions under which ‘end of life’ treatments may be given special weighting relative to other health care interventions.

Off

This project seeks to examine whether a social preference exists for giving higher priority to life-extending, end of life treatments than to other types of treatments, using preference data elicited from the general public.

The project comprised four stated preference studies, all of which asked survey respondents to consider a series of hypothetical scenarios and to choose which of two patients they would prefer to treat, assuming that the health service has enough funds to treat one but not both of them.

Literature reviews

Journal article

KK Shah, A Tsuchiya, AJ Wailoo (2018) Valuing health at the end of life: A review of stated preference studies in the social sciences literature. Social Science and Medicine; 204: 39-50

Presentation

Valuing health at the end of life (seminar at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 2015)

DSU report

Assessing technologies at the end of life: a review of empirical evidence (PDF, 172KB) (November 2009)

Empirical study one

Discussion paper

KK Shah, A Tsuchiya, A Wailoo (2011) Valuing health at the end of life: an exploratory preference elicitation study (PDF, 364KB). HEDS Discussion Paper 11/17 (December 2011)

Empirical study two

Journal article

KK Shah, A Tsuchiya, A Wailoo (2014) Valuing health at the end of life: an empirical study of public preferences. European Journal of Health Economics; 15 (4): 389-399

Presentation

Valuing health at the end of life: DSU preference study (PDF, 478KB) (SMDM conference, Oslo, 2012)

Empirical study three

Journal article, including updated analysis of the data

KK Shah, A Tsuchiya, A Wailoo (2015) Valuing health at the end of life: a stated preference discrete choice experiment. Social Science and Medicine; 124: 48-56

DSU report

Valuing health at the end of life: a stated preference discrete choice experiment (December 2012).

Full version (PDF, 400KB)

Summary (PDF, 76KB)

Empirical study four

DSU report

KK Shah, A Tsuchiya and A J Wailoo (2019) Valuing health at the end of life: an examination of framing effects and study design considerations (PDF, 1.3MB). NICE DSU Report 2019.

Presentation

KK Shah, A Tsuchiya, A Wailoo. Preferences for an end of life ‘premium’: an examination of framing effects and study design considerations (presentation at the International Academy of Health Preference Research meeting, 2017)

A global reputation

Sheffield is a world top-100 research university with a global reputation for excellence. We're a member of the Russell Group: one of the 24 leading UK universities for research and teaching.