Insights 2021: Spending wisely on health, can we do better?

Demographic changes, unhealthy lifestyles and more complex health needs are all factors leading to increased pressure on the public purse and an expectation that the demand for healthcare will rise annually. Could biomarkers help us to predict the use of primary and secondary healthcare services in the future and how healthcare costs could be better managed? In the context of public health and the social determinants of health, people who have been worst affected by the Covid-19 are generally those who had worse health outcomes before the pandemic. With area-based investment expected to grow, what lessons can be learnt from area-based regeneration programmes to help generate public health gains beyond what highly stretched mainstream services will be able to do on their own?

Hosted by the Understanding Society Policy and Partnerships team, our speakers will explore these issues with time for questions and debate.

 

• The value of biomarkers as predictors of health – Professor Steve Pudney, Professor of Econometrics, School of Health and Related Research, University of Sheffield.
• Stress-related ‘wear and tear’: using allostatic load biomarkers to predict changes in self-reported health – Dr Luke Barry, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Public Health, School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences, Queen’s University Belfast.
• Neighbourhood renewal policies and health and wellbeing in post-conflict Northern Ireland – Dr Gretta Mohan (@gretta_mohan), Research Officer, Economic and Social Research Institute, Ireland.
• The policy perspective – Anita Charlesworth (@AnitaCTHF), Director of REAL Centre (Research and Economic Analysis for the Long term), The Health Foundation.