With rising health care costs and demands, coupled with a finite set of resources, health care systems throughout the world are increasingly challenged to provide value for money. Economics is about the use of scarce resources in an efficient and equitable way.
SPHA 532 Health Economics (MHA Year One) explores the contributions of health economists to debates relating to improving efficiency of health care service organization and delivery. This course will provide students an understanding of the theories and concepts that underpin health economics and demonstrate how these can be applied to health policy and health care decision making.
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Instructor Profile
Stirling Bryan
Professor, School of Population and Public Health, UBC
Scientific Director, BC Support Unit
Dr. Stirling Bryan is the Scientific Director of the BC Support Unit and professor in the School of Population and Public Health. In 2005/2006, he was a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy, based at Stanford University. He chairs both the Advisory Board for CIHR’s Institute for Health Services & Policy Research and CADTH’s Health Technology Expert Review Panel. In addition, Stirling is a member of the Editorial Board of Health Economics, a journal for which he is also an Associate Editor. Stirling’s research interests span the areas of economic evaluation and health technology assessment from applied and methodological perspectives, including preference elicitation and outcome measurement, and the use of economic analyses in decision-making.
Mark Harrison
Associate Professor, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, UBC
Scientist, Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences (CHÉOS); Providence Health Care Research Institute; Professorship in Sustainable Health Care
Mark Harrison joined the UBC Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2014 and leads a health economics program within the Collaboration for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE) group. The program considers patient-physician decision-making, understanding the role of preferences in treatment decisions, and evaluating the impact of policy interventions on patient and health care system outcomes. Increasingly, Mark is looking to study the access to health care of marginalized populations and the relationship between health/health care and the environment. Mark is the health economist on the British Columbia Ministry of Health’s Health Technology Assessment Committee.