Learn how Patient Reported Outcome Measures and Quality Adjusted Life Years can compare treatments and inform healthcare spending.
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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.
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, well-being 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.
By the end of the course, you'll be able to...
Discuss what health means and how to measure its impact on quality of life.
Evaluate how to develop and use patient reported outcome measures including their limitations in decision-making.
Calculate QALYs in simple examples to arrive at values which can be used to compare treatment benefits.
Perform a time trade off to develop an understanding of how this method can be used to value health states and generate preference weights.
Debate who should value our health. Should it be patients, health professionals or the general public and should this be different for children’s health?
Compare where QALYs are used in healthcare decision-making worldwide and discuss the merits of this method compared to those used where you live.
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?”
What do people say about this course?
"Thank you for a very well structured and presented course. The interactive elements (trying out the measures and voting) helped me think and engage more. This is a great introduction to a complex subject and has motivated me to find out more."
Gill Charman
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