There is a need to understand the practicality, validity and reliability of using utility measures with children and adolescents. We designed a pilot study in order to help guide the selection of an appropriate health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL) questionnaire for adolescents to be used in...

Currently, health state values are usually obtained from members of the general public trying to imagine what the state would be like rather than by patients who are actually in the various states of health. Valuations of a health state by patients tend to vary from those of the general...

The randomised controlled trial (RCT) has developed a central role in applied cost-effectiveness studies in health care as the vehicle for analysis. This paper considers the role of trial-based economic evaluation in this era of explicit decision making. It is argued that any framework for...

Recently the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) updated its methods guidance for technology assessment. One aspect of the new guidance is to require the use of probabilistic sensitivity analysis with all cost-effectiveness models submitted to the Institute. The purpose of this...

Brouwer and colleagues [1] argue that the reasons for specifying an equal discount rate for health outcomes and costs in the recent guidance on methods of technology appraisal issued by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) [2] is both opaque and wrong. They argue that a lower...

There is a need to understand the practicality, validity and reliability of using utility measures with children and adolescents. We designed a pilot study in order to help guide the selection of an appropriate health-related quality of life (HRQoL) questionnaire for adolescents to be used in...