Health economics Information: The Quest for Efficiency in Health Care
course leader: Moira Napper

This is a half-day continuing education course designed to demonstrate an effective approach to identifying economic information in health care. The session aims to enhance participants’ professional role in the identification and utilisation of this information through focusing on:

• The scope of the subject of health economics; relevant information sources; health economics in the context of evidence-based health care.
• The characteristics of the health economic evaluation literature viz. methodological quality, reporting issues, bibliographic database indexing; information sources which provide value-added information on health economic evaluations
• The basic principles of quality assessment of economic evaluations.

Course instruction will take the form of a presentation with overheads plus audience participation in the form of short ‘brainstorming sessions’ and general discussion/sharing of experience. In addition, participants will be requested to pre-prepare for the session by reading a prescribed published economic evaluation in conjunction with a set of questions designed to introduce the basic principles of quality assessment.
Since qualifying as a librarian in 1990, Moira Napper has worked in the health care sector specialising in information relating to the ‘non-clinical’ aspects of health care eg. health services delivery, health care management and policy. Since joining the Health Economics Research Unit in 1996, this expertise has been further developed within the context of the health economics field. Over the past 4-5 years, Moira has given several presentations on issues relating to health economic information and co-hosted a number of workshops designed to teach skills for the identification and quality assessment of health economic evaluation studies.