PGI School of Public Health Organizes Symposium on Health Technology Assessment

By 121 News

Chandigarh 04^th December:- The PGI School of Public Health organized a Symposium for the policy makers, program managers in health care, clinicians and researchers on the role of economic evaluation of health care interventions and programs in shaping policy. The Symposium entitled "Economic Evidence for Policy and Clinical Decision Making" which was inaugurated by Prof YK Chawla was attended by more than 200 participants who came from Thailand, Australia, North Korea, and various parts of India including Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Orissa, New Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh.

Prof. YK Chawla lauded the role of School of Public Health in generating economic evidence for policy making. He emphasized on increasing need for evaluating health care treatments on the ground of cost effectiveness.

The plenary session was chaired by S. Narayanan, Mission Director, National Health Mission, and Haryana. Global experiences on use of health technology assessment, which involves evaluating the health care programs and interventions in terms of their value for money, were shared by eminent health economists, Dr Yot Teerawattananon who is the Founding Leader, Health Intervention Technology Assessment Program in Thailand, Dr. Stephen Jan who is a Professor of Health Economics at Sydney Medical School, Australia and Dr. Abha Mehndiratta,the India Technical Advisor of National Institute of Health and Care Excellence. UK. The assessment of Indian scenario was shared by Dr Shankar Prinja, Associate Professor of Health Economics in PGI.

The highlight of the symposium was a panel discussion wherein policy makers including Chetan PS Rao, Deputy Director of PGI and S Narayanan, Mission Director, NHM Haryana shared their experiences of how do they plan and prioritise various health care services within the available budgets to their respective organizations. The experts along with the policy makers responded to various questions on why the allocation on health care is sub-optimal, to how the health services can be made more cost effective. Sh Chetan Rao elaborated on various initiatives in PGI to make the services more efficient, ranging from the development of IT systems to improving the drug procurement systems.

Dr Yot and Stephen Jan highlighted on the need to have greater funding from the Government for undertaking such cost effectiveness evaluations, and to have better governance structures which can make the process of decision making transparent and acceptable to the range of stakeholders.