India is embarking on an ambitious journey to provide UHC for its 1.2bn people, one sixth of the world’s population, through a national health assurance scheme. Today’s move of RSBY (India’s largest health insurance scheme, for its Below Poverty Line population) into the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare appears to be a significant step towards that goal.
HTA capacity development across Asia
HITAP’s activities during the Prince Mahidol Award Conference (PMAC) 2015 focused on an overarching theme – priority-setting for universal health coverage (UHC), which is also the theme for next year’s PMAC. As a new member of the HITAP team, I was involved in different activities during the Conference, particularly helping out at the PMAC 2016 booth and two side meetings. …
Cuban medical education: The cat that couldn’t bark?
The award of almost 200 free scholarships to enable students from United States of America to study medicine in Cuba came as quite a surprise at an All Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health meeting on 4 March 2015, chaired by Lord Crisp, titled ‘Potential Lessons for Primary Care Emerging from the Cuban Model of Medical Education’. Surely the USA’s …
Setting priorities for universal health coverage in South Africa
Professor Tony Culyer, founding Vice-Chair of NICE and Chair of the NICE International Advisory Group / iDSI Steering Group, will be delivering a public lecture entitled ‘Prioritising health expenditures on the road to National Health Insurance (NHI)’ at Wits University, Johannesburg on 23 March 2015. Prof Culyer will be joining Wits University as a Visiting Distinguished Professor, working together with …
We need better value from every rand we spend on healthcare in South Africa
South Africa is in the process of preparing for a National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme to reach universal health coverage by 2025. Attaining this goal in a resource-constrained environment will rely in part on understanding which interventions should be prioritised and how resources should be allocated.
The NICE threshold: How much is too much? Who decides?
Prof Karl Claxton, University of York, and colleagues have argued that NICE is advising the UK National Health Service “to pay too much” for new drugs. NICE typically recommends treatments for use in the NHS where their cost-effectiveness falls below the threshold of around £20,000 and £30,000 per QALY gained (quality-adjusted life year). New research led by Claxton suggests that paying more …
Scoping visit to Ethiopia
January 2015 Associate director of NICE International Francoise Cluzeau undertook a scoping visit to Ethiopia in conjunction with the Institute of Tropical Medicine (Antwerp) and EVIDENT, an extensive network of North-South partners that aims to enhance evidence-informed decision-making and policy driven research in both health and nutrition in response to local priority concerns. The visit included meetings with the State …
Development of the Reference Case (2014)
The Gates Reference Case is launched at the Houses of Parliament June 2014 NICE International launched the Gates Reference Case, a principle-based standardised methodology for good practice in the planning, conduct and reporting of economic evaluation for informing priority setting in health. Senior academics, donors and policy makers attended the launch at the Houses of parliament, which was hosted by …
Work in India at Central level
December 2014 The Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) is the Government of India health insurance scheme for families below the poverty line (BPL), with over 37 million families currently enrolled. RSBY covers a range of inpatient services and surgical procedures, provided by a network of private and public hospitals and reimbursed on a fee-for-service basis with defined benefits packages (bundle …
WHO Eastern Medditeranean Regional Office meeting
December 2014 Members of NICE International, at the request of the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office (EMRO) attended as expert advisers to the second inter-country meeting on Health Technology Assessment (HTA), held in Cairo, Egypt. We had the opportunity to present the governance and evidence collection processes within NICE, and to discuss and share experience with colleagues from across the …