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Carer Preferences in Economic Evaluation and Healthcare Decision Making

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Abstract

The preferences of informal carers are important to capture for healthcare decision making. This paper discusses how these preferences relate to the economic evaluation of health and care interventions. Three main issues are highlighted. First, there is a need to consider carer impact routinely in economic evaluations. Second, more debate is required around the ethical issues stemming from the inclusion of interdependent preferences in healthcare decision making. Third, there are a number of situations where carer and patient preferences may conflict and practical ways of representing and handling these conflicts would be useful.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript. The authors have no conflicts of interest and received no specific funding in relation to this manuscript. HA acknowledges funding from the UK Medical Research Council for an early career fellowship in the economics of health (G1002334).

Author contributions

HA drafted the manuscript with input from JR and NM. All authors revised the manuscript following peer review. HA is the guarantor for the overall content of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Health Economics Unit, School of Health and Population Sciences, University of Birmingham, Public Health Building, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK

    Hareth Al-Janabi

  2. Flinders Health Economics Group, School of Medicine, Flinders University, Bedford Park, Adelaide, SA, 5042, Australia

    Nikki McCaffrey & Julie Ratcliffe

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  1. Hareth Al-Janabi
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  2. Nikki McCaffrey
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  3. Julie Ratcliffe
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Correspondence to Hareth Al-Janabi.

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Al-Janabi, H., McCaffrey, N. & Ratcliffe, J. Carer Preferences in Economic Evaluation and Healthcare Decision Making. Patient 6, 235–239 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40271-013-0035-y

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