New PhD Opportunity in Health Economics and QoL Research

New PhD Opportunity in health economics and quality of life research

Expressions of Interest are being sought from potential PhD students to undertake research supporting an ARC Discovery project to develop a new quality of life instrument. The PhD project will develop methods to map among existing instruments that assess health-related quality of life and other aspects of wellbeing such as independence, dignity and autonomy, and then apply and evaluate the new instrument alongside existing instruments in decision analytic models.

What will your PhD involve?

This PhD student will be working with a team of economists, psychologists and statisticians to develop new methods of measuring and valuing quality of life. The PhD student will undertake systematic reviews, and will apply psychometric and modelling methods to compare existing quality of life instruments, and inform the development of a new instrument.

Why are we undertaking this research?

Value for money is central to decision making for health and social programs- we must use scarce resources wisely to provide the best outcomes for the population. To do this, our tools need to measure benefits across all interventions, from those that focus narrowly on extending life to those which aim to improve overall wellbeing, which encompasses health related quality of life and other outcomes: independence, dignity, safety, autonomy.

What will the research achieve?

This project will develop a new approach to valuing outcomes of health and social interventions, to capture these broader impacts. It will develop a new instrument that measures effects on health and other outcomes and the trade-off between these. It will do this by using a novel approach to combining dimensions of quality of life and by undertaking discrete choice experiments to measure trade-offs between the different dimensions of health and social outcomes. The new approach will allow existing measures of outcome to be combined to provide a new measure with the capacity to measure value for money in a range of populations, conditions and settings.