Abstract

Economic evaluations are important in healthcare because they help to inform decisions on allocating resources within cash-limited systems.1^,2 Such evaluations are increasingly carried out in appraisals of new treatments, such as those by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the Scottish Medicines Consortium, and the All Wales Medicines Strategy Group. Healthcare professionals and others need a working knowledge of health economic evaluations to assess or reach decisions informed by results from such calculations. Here we discuss different types of health economic evaluations and how the calculations from these analyses are used in decision-making.