ReviewHealth expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy2002
Resource allocation, social values and the QALY: a review of the debate and empirical evidence.
Review in Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy, 2002. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 53 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
53 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Public preferences for allocating health system resources in Canada: a systematic review.Systematic reviews · 2025Pooled it
- Systematic Review of the Relative Social Value of Child and Adult Health.PharmacoEconomics · 2024Pooled it
- Willingness to pay for a quality-adjusted life year: a systematic review with meta-regression.The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care · 2022Pooled it
- A systematic review of stated preference studies reporting public preferences for healthcare priority setting.The patient · 2014Pooled it
- An economic analysis of Native CHOICES.Journal of substance use and addiction treatment · 2026Trial
- Equal access to treatment for hearing loss in Chile: do all people have the same opportunities to receive appropriate treatment? A scoping review.International journal for equity in health · 2025Article
- Does context matter? A discrete choice experiment investigating the impact of palliative context on EQ-5D-5L health state valuation.Quality of life research : an international journal of quality of life aspects of treatment, care and rehabilitation · 2025Article
- The Citizens' Distributional Preferences for Health Care Resource Allocations: The Non-Negligible Role of Option Value.Health economics · 2025Article
- Eliciting Distributive Preferences in Health Care Resource Allocation: A Person Trade-Off Study.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- What defines the "value" of robotic surgery for patients with gastrointestinal cancers? Perspectives from a U.S. Cancer Center.Annals of gastroenterological surgery · 2024Review
- QALY-type preference and willingness-to-pay among end-of-life patients with cancer treatments: a pilot study using discrete choice experiment.Quality of life research : an international journal of quality of life aspects of treatment, care and rehabilitation · 2024Article
- Article
- The value of a model to consider the cost-effectiveness of interventions for the treatment of major depressive disorder in Canada.CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association journal = journal de l'Association medicale canadienne · 2023Article
- Alternatives to the quality-adjusted life year: How well do they address common criticisms?Health services research · 2023Article
- Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Temocillin Treatment in Patients with Febrile UTI Accounting for the Emergence of Antibiotic Resistance.Applied health economics and health policy · 2022Article
- Empowering local research ethics review of antibacterial mass administration research.Infectious diseases of poverty · 2022Review
- The application of the QALY measure in the assessment of the effects of health interventions on an older population: a systematic scoping review.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2021Article
- Public and decision-maker stated preferences for pharmaceutical subsidy decisions in Iran: an application of the discrete choice experiment.Journal of pharmaceutical policy and practice · 2021Article
- Eliciting the public preferences for pharmaceutical subsidy in Iran: a discrete choice experiment study.Journal of pharmaceutical policy and practice · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Most health economists agree that public preferences should play a major role in setting criteria for distributing scarce resources. The quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is used as a preference-based measure for the outcome of health-care activities in health economic evaluative studies. Traditionally, health economists proposed maximizing the additional health gain in terms of QALYs so as to maximize social welfare. Evidence has grown however, that neither potential health gain as a single relevant determinant of value, nor the rule of maximizing this health gain are sufficient. Concerns about fairness and equity are also important to the public in distributional decisions. This paper reviews the debate on the role and limitations of the QALY in health-care priority setting and the empirical evidence surrounding it. A framework is used to systematically explore the available data on factors considered to be important to the public in health-care resource allocation, and to investigate how these fit with the implicit value judgements inherent in the original QALY formulation. Potential sources of social value are classified into (1) factors that relate to the characteristics of patients and (2) factors related to the characteristics of the intervention's effect on patients' health. As well as these main categories, the article considers preferences for distributional rules. Recent approaches that aim to capture public preferences more comprehensively and to better reflect the value attributed to different health-care programmes in economic evaluation methods are outlined briefly.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.