The project evaluated how decisions are made about spending NHS funding and made recommendations to involve more local decision makers.
Decisions about how to spend NHS funding are usually framed to inform national decision-making processes, with a focus on the expected cost-effectiveness of interventions to impact costs and benefits over a long time. However, a lot of decisions happen at a local level (hospitals and clinics) and research has shown that the current means of conducting and sharing information on cost-effectiveness analyses is not impacting decision making at this level.
This research project explores how these studies can be improved to be more relevant to what is needed at a local level. This is done by considering the specific recommendations of how they are conducted and how these might not fit with the challenges faced by local decision makers. Five areas are identified where the current recommendations need to be changed to be of more use locally. To show how these changes may impact decisions a case study analysis is used throughout.
