A life-course approach to measuring capability for economic evaluation of health and social care interventions (360G-Wellcome-205384_Z_16_Z)

Health services face increasingly difficult decisions about what interventions to provide from available resources. These economic decisions currently concentrate on maximising health gain, but there is growing recognition that this is too narrow. An important alternative is to focus on generating capability wellbeing in the population. There are generic capability (ICECAP) measures for assessing the impact of health and care interventions for adults, older people and those at end of life, but not for younger people. Extending measurement of capability to children requires innovative step-changes in thinking (i) to a life-course approach that accepts differing values at different stages of life and (ii) to a dual focus on current wellbeing and future ‘well-becoming’, situating child measures in the context of development to adulthood. This research addresses these complex conceptual and empirical issues in a UK setting. In brief, key goals are to: (a) generate, value and validate new measures of capability wellbeing for children; (b) explore evidence on values during the life-course and generate an integrated framework for measuring capability wellbeing/well-becoming across the life-course; and (c) explore end of life assessment in children, given this life-stage does not typically directly follow childhood. Keywords: capability, children, economic evaluation, qualitative methods, life-course