With rising health care costs and demands, coupled with a finite set of resources, health care systems throughout the world are increasingly challenged to provide value for money. Economics is about the use of scarce resources in an efficient and equitable way.
SPHA 532 Health Economics (MHA Year One) will explore the contributions of health economists to debates relating to improving efficiency of health care service organization and delivery. This course will provide students an understanding of the theories and concepts that underpin health economics and demonstrate how these can be applied to provide insights for health policy and health care decision making.
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Instructor Profile
Dr. Stirling Bryan
Professor, School of Population and Public Health, UBC
Director, Centre for Clinical Epidemiology & Evaluation
Dr. Stirling Bryan is Director of the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology & Evaluation, and full professor in the Department of Medicine at UBC. He is also honorary professor at the University of Birmingham (UK), and an Associate of the UBC Centre for Health Services & Policy Research. In 2005/06 Stirling was a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy, based at Stanford. He sits on the UK Medical Research Council’s College of Experts, the Scientific Committee of the International Health Economics Association and the Editorial Board of Health Economics, a journal for which he is also an Associate Editor. Dr Bryan’s research interests span the areas of economic evaluation and health technology assessment from applied and methodological perspectives, including preference elicitation and outcome measurement, and the use of economic analyses in decision-making.
Dr. David Whitehurst
Dr. David Whitehurst
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences, SFU
Scientist, Centre for Clinical Epidemiology & Evaluation
Dr. David Whitehurst is an Assistant Professor (Health Economics) within the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University. His research focuses on the generic assessment of quality of life, with a specific interest in the role and validation of preference-based outcome measures suitable for use in economic evaluation (clinical contexts include spinal cord injury and a range of musculoskeletal conditions). In addition to research, Dr. Whitehurst has a keen interest in teaching the economics of health and health care and has extensive experience as a lecturer, supervisor and co-ordinator within undergraduate and postgraduate courses.