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| HTA FutureLearn homepage |
Why are some treatments made available to patients while others are not?
Explore how Health Technology Assessment (HTA) informs decisions about whether we should have access to certain treatments. This course is based on the University of Sheffield’s online distance-learning programme, the MSc International Health Technology Assessment.
You can continue to learn about healthcare decision-making in our other online course Measuring and Valuing Health.
What topics will we cover?We’ll look at some of the key processes of HTA in order to answer some key questions about a new treatment, such as:
- How do we know if the treatment is of benefit?
- How can we make sense of all the evidence?
- How is evidence of the cost of drugs used in HTA?
We’ll also explore how the final HTA report fits within the wider range of information used to make decisions about which treatments to fund.
Who is the course for?
You may work in the medical or pharmaceutical profession or study a subject such as medicine, nursing, healthcare or health economics.
Or perhaps you’re a patient or an interested member of the public who wants to know the story behind the headlines. This course will help you to make an informed contribution to discussions about NHS decisions.
You should have an interest in healthcare decision making and, in particular, the economic aspects that this involves. No particular mathematical skills or previous economics experience are required, though a basic familiarity with healthcare research could be helpful. The course is accessible to anyone with a secondary or high school-level education.
You can find out more about some of the themes covered in this course in Claire Beecroft’s post for the FutureLearn blog: “Penny pinchers or NICE people? Why someone’s got to choose which treatments get funded.”
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| Claire Beecroft - HEDS Director of Learning and Teaching |