The European Health Economics Associations’ (EuHea) biannual conference in Oslo, Norway, July 5th to July 8th 2022 was successfully hosted by the Department of Health Management and Health Economics (HELED) at the University of Oslo and the Frisch Centre.
For many, this was the first in-person conference in two years! Nearly 700 participants from around the world shared their research, knowledge, and thoughts. A quick glance at the program tells us that the major focus seems to be at how to handle the ageing population, with regards to long-term care and substitution between formal and informal care.
Research on palliation and end-of-life care was also presented, with insight from several countries.
Among them, from Austria, where Dr. Claudia Fischer (postdoctoral researchers from the Center of Public Health at the Medical University of Vienna) presented first results of the EU-funded project iLIVE – a systematic review on methodological aspects regarding conducting economic evaluations in the palliative and end-of-life-care settings. “Our findings indicate that there are still multiple methodological challenges to tackle to ensure valid cost-effectiveness analyses in the palliative and end-of-life settings”, said the first author of the paper, Dr. Claudia Fischer.
Professor Eline Aas from the Department of Health Management and Health Economics at the University of Oslo, presented a paper from the SAFE-project, funded by the Norwegian Cancer Association, on how the living situation differs between patients at their end-of-life in Norway and Finland. “A finding of particular interest, is that persons with lower socioeconomic status, compared to persons with high socioeconomic status, have more days at home in Finland, while the opposite effect is found in Norway. This might indicate the ‘days at home’—which has previously been identified as a measure of quality—might not be that in all settings. Alternative explanations are also possible, for example, that people might have different preferences in the different settings.”
Because of a strike in the airplane line SAS, not all participants could join in-person. Thanks to quick response from the arranging committee, Dr. Yuexi Yang from Shandong University, could still lead her session, as a hybrid-session, titled “Health seeking behavior”. Here, she presented the paper titled “Confucian Familism and Shared Decision Making in End-Of-Life for Patients with Advanced Cancer”. Dr. Yang evaluated the impact of confucian familism (e.g. that family as a whole has an ontological priority; a collective family determination) on shared decision-making (SDM) in end-of-life care for patients with advanced cances in China. “Early results imply that the overall level of SDM was low, and that confucial familaism constrained the efficacy of SDM in EOL care for patients with advanced cancer in China”.
To read the full program and abstracts, see link to program.
The date and location for the next EuHea conference is set already: 30.06-03.07 2024, Vienna. The conference will explore how health economics can be approached from different perspectives. Its comprehensive program will feature macro analyses at the health system level, research on the decisions made by key stakeholders, and microeconomic studies on consumption and behaviours of patients and health care providers.