Course date: 9 March 2020
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/valuing-health/10
How do we decide which drugs and treatments to fund?
Healthcare systems around the world are increasingly under pressure to fund drugs, treatments and other healthcare interventions. On this course, you’ll learn how health outcome measures can help us to make more informed decisions about where to spend our limited healthcare budgets. You can continue to learn about healthcare decision-making with our next course Health Technology Assessment (HTA): Choosing Which Treatments Get Funded.
What topics will we cover?
The course focuses on two different types of measures, asking how they’re developed and calculated, and how they’re used by decision makers in practice:
Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs): which are measures completed by the patients themselves, about their health, symptoms, functioning, wellbeing or satisfaction with treatment.
Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs): which compare the benefits of different treatment options, based on the quality and quantity of life they yield.
Who is the course for?
This course will help you understand how and why choices about drugs and treatments have been made. It may inspire you to think about a career in healthcare, local decision making or academia. You may even wish to take your learning further, with the University of Sheffield’s masters degrees and short courses in 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?"