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Quantifying Informal Care for Economic Evaluation in Mental Health

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Mental Health Economics

Abstract

Informal caregivers make a substantial contribution to the care of people with mental health disorders, enabling them to continue living in the community. To provide care, individuals may reduce their paid working hours or leave their jobs, take less leisure time, incur out-of-pocket costs, and experience changes in their health and well-being. The value of this care is widely acknowledged but rarely quantified.

Based on an economic evaluation framework, it is possible to quantify the contribution of informal caregivers’ time by measuring and valuing the care they offer. In practice, few economic evaluations include informal care, and this may reflect that most studies are undertaken from the perspective of a decision maker allocating funding within the public sector. Cost-effectiveness results would differ if caregivers were included, with implications for decision making. This chapter reviews methods to measure informal care time, as well as monetary and nonmonetary approaches to quantifying informal care. Little guidance is available about whether or how to include informal care contributions within economic evaluations. This chapter suggests that it might be important to reflect informal care contributions when the intervention being evaluated is for the caregiver, when the intervention is for the care recipient but with effects on the caregiver, and in order to test the cost-effectiveness of targeting services, with different levels of access to more formal paid care. Formal guidance on when and how to include informal care in economic evaluations would aid greater consistency in the methods applied across evaluations and therefore enhance comparability across evaluations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Health Economics, Heslington Road, University of York, York, UK

    Helen Weatherly & Rita Faria

  2. Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, Nettelbosje 2, Groningen, 9747 AE, Netherlands

    Bernard van den Berg

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  1. Helen Weatherly
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  2. Rita Faria
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  3. Bernard van den Berg
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Correspondence to Helen Weatherly or Bernard van den Berg .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre of Economic Mental Health, Department of Psychiatry, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Denise Razzouk

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Weatherly, H., Faria, R., van den Berg, B. (2017). Quantifying Informal Care for Economic Evaluation in Mental Health. In: Razzouk, D. (eds) Mental Health Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55266-8_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55266-8_17

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