Professor Nancy Devlin presented at EuroQol scientific plenary meeting 2021

A paper led by Professor Nancy Devlin has been presented at EuroQol Scientific Plenary Meeting 2021, which was one of just 10 selected for detailed discussion in this Plenary meeting. The paper highlighted important issues regarding the use of values for child HRQoL in health technology appraisal:

“Values for the EQ-5D-Y obtained from the current protocol are likely to be confounded by society’s attitudes toward children and in particular the importance of longevity. This complicates the ability of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) bodies to disentangle these factors in applying social value judgements about the priority to be accorded to child health care. The EQ-5D-Y values currently being produced have many ‘non-QALY’ uses - but the estimates of QALY gains they produce are not comparable with those for adult value sets, and Incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICERs) based on EQ-5D-Y values cannot be compared with adult ICERs or with the cost effectiveness thresholds typically used in HTA. Effort is urgently needed to address this issue of non-comparability to support use of EQ-5D-Y in cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA)”.