Many decisions in health care hinge of trade-offs between costs and benefits. Provincial drug benefit committees making resource allocation decisions have to judge whether the additional health benefits of new medications outweigh the additional costs. Physicians making clinical decisions must decide if the benefits of a therapeutic option outweigh the harms. In such situations, evidence alone is insufficient and preferences form a crucial component in making high quality decisions. However, experts (committee members, physicians) commonly use their own preferences even though evidence suggests these serve as poor proxies for patients and the public. This presentation will describe some recent methodological advances for integrating preferences of the public into population decisions, and some more conceptual ideas for integrating individual preferences into clinical decisions.

Speaker: Nick Bansback, UBC School of Population and Public Health

Nick Bansback joined the School of Population and Public Health in 2012. He obtained his PhD from the University of Sheffield, UK. His program of research seeks inform policies and practices in health through the application of decision theory.

SPPH's Public Stealth - Storm the Wall team have made it through to the semi-finals and will be racing at 1:45 pm

Come cheer them on!

A timely examination of human values and the health issues that affect us all, ¡Salud! looks at the curious case of Cuba, a cash-strapped country with what the BBC calls ‘one of the world’s best health systems.’ From the shores of Africa to the Americas, !Salud! hits the road with some of the 28,000 Cuban health professionals serving in 68 countries, and explores the hearts and minds of international medical students in Cuba -- now numbering 30,000, including nearly 100 from the USA. Their stories plus testimony from experts around the world bring home the competing agendas that mark the battle for global health—and the complex realities confronting the movement to make healthcare everyone’s birth right.

Professor. Jerry Spiegel of SPPH, who has carried out research in Cuba for 15 years, will be present for discussion of the film