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Health Economic Evaluation for Improving Child Health in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

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Book cover Optimizing Treatment for Children in the Developing World

Abstract

Health care systems require high quality economic evaluations to support wise allocation decisions to enhance child health within the population served. LMICs face the added jeopardy of having very limited resources (human and fiscal) to produce complex economic evaluations within highly constrained healthcare budgets that demand judicious expenditure. Furthermore, conducting economic evaluations in children is challenging methodologically and this is exacerbated in LMICs where healthcare funding and health priorities are influenced by external forces. World Health Organization initiatives such as generalized cost-effectiveness analysis have addressed many of the pertinent methodological issues. However, of 49 economic evaluations of preventive interventions for children published in 2012, only 17 were relevant to LMIC. Of 25 economic evaluations of active pediatric treatments, only four targeted an LMIC population. Greater collaboration between health researchers from LMICs and high-income countries promises, in future, to improve the quality of evidence available for decision-making.

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Acknowledgments

In-kind support was provided by The Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute. The assistance of Nadine Francis is gratefully acknowledged.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Program of Child Health Evaluative Sciences, Peter Gilgan Centre for Research and Learning, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Wendy J. Ungar MSc, PhD & Richard M. Zur PhD

  2. Institute of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Wendy J. Ungar MSc, PhD

Authors
  1. Wendy J. Ungar MSc, PhD
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  2. Richard M. Zur PhD
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wendy J. Ungar MSc, PhD .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pediatrics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Stuart MacLeod

  2. University of Melbourne Medical School, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Suzanne Hill

  3. Departments of Pediatrics and Pharmacology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Gideon Koren

  4. Department of Laboratory Medicine, Division of Clinical Pharmacology, Karolinska University, Hostpital Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

    Anders Rane

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Ungar, W.J., Zur, R.M. (2015). Health Economic Evaluation for Improving Child Health in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. In: MacLeod, S., Hill, S., Koren, G., Rane, A. (eds) Optimizing Treatment for Children in the Developing World. Adis, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15750-4_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15750-4_19

  • Publisher Name: Adis, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15749-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15750-4

  • eBook Packages: MedicineMedicine (R0)

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