On 23 September 2021, M. Perry-Duxbury will defend her PhD dissertation, entitled: ‘Accounting for Future Health Events: Including future costs and valuing future health gains in health care decision-making.'

The optimal allocation of resources towards and within the health care sector continues to be important. It is important to recognise that our current actions regarding the allocation of resources may have consequences that stretch far into the future. The aim of this thesis was to investigate how several future health events can be accounted for in the context of health care decision-making.  The thesis started with an investigation into the standardization of including so-called future unrelated medical costs and future non-medical costs in economic evaluation and in the cost-effectiveness threshold. The finding in this thesis strengthen the argument that accounting for future health events in health care decision-making leads to a more efficient use of health care resources. Furthermore the tools developed from this thesis help standardize the inclusion of future costs. The second part of this thesis covered methods that may be used when eliciting the value of safety and estimated the value of quality-adjusted life year (QALY) gains in the context of an early warning system for infectious disease outbreaks. This thesis finds that when valuing a prevention programme, feelings of safety are worth incorporating. This is because even if an early warning system is never utilised, individuals’ wellbeing may be improved by the feeling of safety generated by the existence of such a system. A conclusion from this research is that if we can better understand the value of public health interventions, the more optimal our policy responses can be.

The PhD defences do not take place publicly in the usual way in the Senate Hall at campus Woudestein or in the Professor Andries Querido Room at the Erasmus MC. The candidates will defend their dissertation either in a small group or online.