The Master plan

Together with Jolene (who’s really been the driving force behind this) and Marcos, I’ve been working in the past few months to try and set up a new _MSc in Health Economic Evaluation and Decision Science _at UCL.

The process has been relatively long and we’ve had to overcome a few bumps, but it would appear that we are being successful $-$ there’re a couple more signatures to get through and all the business with advertisement and setting up a couple of new modules, but these shouldn’t be too terrible!

I think this is a very exciting prospect: the MSc will be made by 8 modules and will comprise a joint core in which students will have the choice of a focus on higher income country or a global context (the latter will tend to emphasise the challenges of low and middle income countries). As the MSc title gives away, in addition, the students will be able to choose a “decision science” stream or an “economics and policy” stream. I think this is very nice and crucial, since we’ll be able to provide interesting options and possibility of selecting from a wide and diverse range of modules from which to learn.

We’ll be involved particularly with the “decision science” stream for which my new module “Bayesian methods in health economics” will be core (mandatory), together with other modules that we currently provide (eg Medical Statistics). Again, I think this is really good as it’s increasingly important (IMHO) to have modellers who have very advanced statistical skills, in health economic evaluation (or more specifically, I should say cost-effectiveness/utility analysis).

If all goes to plan, we’ll start with the first cohort of students in September 2016 $-$ that’s really exciting!