IHEA News – May 2022

IHEA mentorship program – next round 2022/2023

Are you interested in learning from an experienced health economist, getting advice on your research portfolio, and discussing development opportunities and potential career trajectories? Or would you like to share your knowledge and experience as a health economist to guide and support early- and mid-career colleagues? Then join iHEA’s mentoring program as a mentor or mentee for its next round!

The program provides mentoring to early and mid-career health economists from experienced colleagues. In 2021-2022, 64 mentors and mentees from all around the world have been matched.

A minimum of ten years of experience in the field is required for members to volunteer as mentors for early career researchers (ECRs) and 15+ years as mentors for mid-career researchers. Members can apply as ECR mentees if they have received their highest degree within the past seven years (mid-career mentees: 7-15 years ago at the time of application). Applicants are paired based on research interests and other preferences indicated in the mentoring program intake survey and after that they agree on meeting at least four times for a one-year period.

If you had a great experience as a mentor or mentee before and would like to share your insights, please reach out to Adriana König at koenig@lmu.de.

A link to the intake survey as well as the mentoring resource material will be circulated soon. Stay tuned!

Upcoming Webinars for June

Leading the Respondent: Can the background information and the format of the choice sets impact responses to a discrete choice experiment?

Tuesday, May 31, 2022, 6PM EDT / June 1, 2022, 8AM AEST

Description:

Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) are a frequently-used stated preference tool in many areas of health. Usually respondents are presented with background information about a situation in which a preference needs to be expressed, including information about the attributes that describe the options from which a choice is to be made. Respondents are assumed to make utility-maximising decisions, with the utility assumed to be a function of the attribute levels of the options.

While background information, intended to educate respondents about the attributes and their levels, can be presented as text, other presentation formats, such as static and moving images, are possible. In addition the choice sets themselves can have varying numbers of options, options can have varying numbers of attributes and the attributes can have varying numbers of levels. The comparison of respondent results from different versions of a DCE contribute to the understanding of the impact of presentation differences in a DCE on the conclusions.

In this presentation results of a scoping review looking at the impact of presentation differences will be presented. This will be followed by a case study in which results from a patient sample, and two general population samples, one of which received additional contextual information, will be discussed.

Organized By: Health Preference Research SIG
Speaker: Alice Yu


Second and third virtual workshops in series to strengthen capacity for health economics teaching

iHEA’s Teaching Health Economics Special Interest Group (THE SIG) has organized a series of virtual workshops during 2022. The first workshop provided an overview of curriculum development and writing learning outcomes for health economics courses. If you missed this workshop, you can view the presentations here.

Details for the next two virtual workshops are provided below. All interested in developing new courses or enhancing their own teaching skills are encouraged to participate.

Please note: there will be simultaneous translation into several different languages during the workshops, made possible by a grant from the IDRC.

Developing context relevant and inclusive course outlines and reading lists

Thursday June 9th, 2022;7-8:30am EDT, 12-1:30pm UK, 2-3:30pm East Africa; 7-8:30pm China & Western Australia; 9-10:30pm Eastern Australia

Facilitator: Jolene Skordis, University College London (UCL).

Presenters and panellists: Neha Batura and Lucy Irvine, UCL; and Jane Chuma, World Bank and Kenyan Medical Research Institute (KEMRI)

The second in the Teaching Health Economics (THE) virtual workshop series focuses on identifying topics for each session in a course or module and associated reading material. The discussions will highlight the importance of identifying topics and readings that are most relevant to the local context. In addition, the workshop will consider how to ensure courses are inclusive and contain diverse perspectives, based on UCL’s process of developing a toolkit to decolonize global health and development curricula. Finally, information will be shared on how academics in low- and middle-income countries can directly access a wide range of publications to use in their teaching programs at no (or low) cost. The workshop will be interactive, with structured input from participants, facilitated panel discussions and two brief presentations.

Update on iHEA Special Interest Groups

Early Career Researchers Special Interest Group

I’d like to stay in academia, even though the workload is brutal… as I’m in the fortunate position of doing something that I enjoy.”

– Dr Joanne Flavel.

In this series of interviews with Early Career Researcher (ERC) health economists, we look at understanding what paths people have taken to become health economists, what ECRs do as health economists and what their aspirations are. In previous years we have asked our interviewees to answer questions about themselves in written form. This year, we are spicing this up a bit and asking them on the fly, in front of a zoom camera.

We hope you enjoy hearing about journeys that ECRs have taken.

We are delighted to introduce you to today’s ECR, Dr. Joanne Flavel, who is a research fellow at the University of Adelaide in South Australia, at Stretton Health Equity. Jo has qualifications and experience in economics and public health; she is a scholar in social epidemiology, but her quantitative skills and social science background are interdisciplinary.

Her research focuses primarily on health equity and social determinants of health.

The interviewer is Dr Cate Bailey, an ECR in the Health Economics Unit at the University of Melbourne. Her background is in public health research, applied statistics and health economics, and she has previously worked in Federal and State government in Australia.

Here is a snippet from the interview:

“What I like about being a health economist is that the skills are so useful for so many things.  I like that a lot of our skills are policy relevant, but the challenges that it has posed is that sometimes the research can be, well not so much controversial, but not necessarily liked by some in government. The answers are not always what people want, but it is important to explore that.”

Click on the video to watch the interview or access the transcript online here!

Successfully Navigating Your PhD: A Mentoring Workshop for 3rd Year + Women & Non-Binary PhD Students in Economics & Economics-Adjacent Fields

Friday, September 30, 2022 (On Zoom)

Organizers: Amanda Agan, Vellore Arthi, Marianne Bitler, Rowena Gray, Erin Hengel, Elaine Hill, Bhagyashree Katare, Maya Rossin-Slater, Carolyn Sloane, Jenna Stearns, Lucy Xiaolu Wang, Sabrina Young
With Support from AEA-CSWEP

APPLICATIONS DUE: June 3, 2022

LEARN MORE HERE.

Past Webinar Recordings

If you are worried you will be unable to attend our webinars live or would like to revisit a recording of a webinar, you can visit our website to view our past webinar recordings page. We request members and non-members to register for webinars only if they are planning on attending the webinar live.

iHEA Career Center

The IHEA Career Center allows you to post your job openings and fellowships, find potential candidates and search new positions. It is open to members and non-members alike. We do hope that you utilize this tool and should you have any questions, please reach out to jobs@healtheconomics.org

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