Event Details

Luis Filipe, Health Economics and Nicola Rennie, Medical School

Speaker - Luis Fillipe

Title: Trade-offs during the COVID-19 pandemic: A discrete choice experiment about policy preferences in Portugal

Authors: Luís Filipe, Sara Valente de Almeida, Eduardo Costa, Joana Gomes da Costa, Francisca Vargas Lopes, João Vasco Santos

Abstract:

The need to control the sanitary situation during the COVID-19 pandemic has led governments to implement several restrictions with substantial social and economic impacts. We explored people’s trade-offs in terms of their income, life restrictions, education, and poverty in the society, compared to their willingness to avoid deaths. We applied a web-based discrete choice experiment to elicit preferences of the Portuguese citizens for these attributes and computed the marginal rate of substitution in terms of avoided deaths. We recorded 2,191 responses that faced the possibility of having 250 COVID-19 related deaths per day as the worst possible outcome from the choice levels presented. Estimates suggested that individuals would be willing to sacrifice 30% instead of 10% of their income to avoid approximately 47 deaths per day during the first six months of 2021. For the same period, they would also accept 30% of the students’ population to become educationally impaired, instead of 10%, to avoid approximately 25 deaths; a strict lockdown, instead of mild life restrictions, to avoid approximately 24 deaths; and 45% of the population to be in risk of poverty, instead of 25%, to avoid approximately 101 deaths. Our paper shows that avoiding deaths was strongly preferred to the remaining societal impacts; and that being a female, as well as working on site, led individuals to be more averse to such health hazards. Furthermore, we show how a DCE can be used to assess the societal support to decision-making during times of crisis.

Speaker: Nicola Rennie

Title: Collaboration and communication in health data science

Abstract: Health data science can help to extract meaningful insights from routinely collected healthcare data, leading to improved patient outcomes and more effective healthcare strategies. Since research in collaboration with the NHS gives better context for our data and helps to make sure our solutions are more meaningful, any outputs need to be communicated clearly and effectively. In this talk, I’ll give an overview of the work I’ve been involved with since joining the Centre for Health Informatics, Computing, and Statistics earlier this year. In the first half of this talk, I’ll showcase several research projects carried out in collaboration with different local NHS trusts, discussing both the methods and the outcomes from the work in the context of the NHS. In the second half of this talk, I’ll discuss existing work and open research questions in the area of communicating data and results to non-technical audiences, and the implications this has for teaching statistics in different disciplines and settings.