Health Economics Research Network (HERN), ARK Foundation, Centre for Health Economics (CHE) of University of York and DiaDem jointly arranged a webinar titled “Health Economics Tool’’ on December 7, 2022 at Bangladesh time 7 pm and UK time 1 pm.

The webinar session was taken by Professor Tim Ensor and Bryony Dawkins from Leeds Institute of Health Sciences, University of Leeds, UK. The agenda of the session was to discuss the role of health economics in helping to understand and evaluate health systems and health system interventions. The presentation was designed to briefly outline nine techniques and tools, from understanding sources of funding and funding flows, through analysis of equity, economic evaluation and provider payments.

Simon Walker, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Health Economics, University of York, started the webinar with the welcome speech. SM Abdullah, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Dhaka and a Research Fellow at ARK Foundation chaired the webinar.

The session started with Professor Tim Ensor, who demonstrated on “Health Economics and Health System Intervention” part of the presentation. This part focused mainly on how can the health economics tool be used to assist with designing and evaluating health system interventions.  Therefore, he discussed about resource mobilization and utilization, equity of funding, monetary value of proposed intervention, role of incentive in intervention implementation etc. After Professor Ensor, Bryony Dawkins demonstrated the rest of the presentation on economic evaluation of intervention. She discussed about the evaluation techniques, its importance in health economics, cost analysis, what type evaluation is appropriate in different scenario, things to consider when planning an economic evaluation, analytical approach. Equity issues etc.

Academics, experts, researchers, development professionals, and students from different institutions (research organizations, NGOs and INGOs, public and private universities) joined the webinar. A total of 64 participants had joined the webinar.

The Health Economics Research Network (HERN) aims to create a platform which will facilitate high quality research in the field of health economics to inform policy and practice in order to improve population health. As the capacity building is a priority objective, HERN has plans to organize more webinars and interactive sessions on need basis. The future activities of HERN will also be available on social networks.

Newsletter written by –

Fariha Islam Munia,

Secretariat, Health Economics Research Network (HERN)