Skip to 0 minutes and 15 seconds Have you ever wondered why some drugs are made available to patients via healthcare services such as the NHS while others are not? In this course, we’ll look at how healthcare organisations make decisions about whether we should have access to treatments, and we’ll focus on a key part of the information used in this decision making process - the Health Technology Assessment, or HTA for short.
Skip to 0 minutes and 39 seconds Over five weeks, we’ll take you through the processes that go into creating a Health Technology Assessment. We’ll investigate how HTA can help aid decision making by finding and bringing together a wide variety of evidence about both the effects of treatments, and what they cost, and their economic impacts. And we’ll look at how sophisticated research methods and techniques are used to bring this evidence together in a format that can be used in a variety of health systems around the world. We’ll look at some of the key stages in the HTA process in order to answer some questions about a new treatment, such as how do we know if the treatment is of benefit?
Skip to 1 minute and 15 seconds How can we make sense of all the evidence that’s out there? And how is evidence about the cost and economic impacts of drugs used within HTA? Finally, we’ll explore how the HTA report fits within the wider range of information used to make decisions about which treatments to fund. The educators for this course are based in the School of Health and Related Research at The University of Sheffield and are experts in this kind of research. So you’ll be learning from people who are both actively involved in HTA and in developing the research methods that are used.
Skip to 1 minute and 46 seconds We’ll hear from expert reviewers, health economists and researchers as they give insights into how they contribute to a final Health Technology Assessment report that could inform huge decisions about what treatments are available to you and to others. We want to help anyone, regardless of their previous knowledge of the subject, to understand more about HTA. So whether you’re a health professional, a carer, a patient, or simply an interested member of the public, the next time you hear a news story reporting that a drug is not going to be made available via health services, you will understand that it’s never simply a case of it being too expensive.
