A systematic review of economic evaluations of vaccines in Middle East and North Africa countries: is existing evidence good enough to support policy decision-making?

Does health economics research align with the disease burden in the Middle East and North Africa region? A systematic review of economic evaluation studies on public health interventions

“…Furthermore, barriers to conducting economic evaluations still exist in this region. These barriers have been discussed elsewhere in previous studies [ 6 , 18 , 19 , 84 – 86 ].…”

“…Overall, study quality was good, with a median of 82.6% of applicable items being met (SD 14%). Forty-four studies (72%) achieved scores above an arbitrary threshold of 75%; therefore, they were considered high quality and potentially useful in policy decision-making [ 18 , 19 , 82 ]. The mean (SD) of items reported was 80.8% (14%).…”

“…Consequently, this review found that the number of economic evaluation studies on public health interventions was lower than economic evaluation studies on diagnostic and therapeutic interventions (69 studies) [ 19 ] but higher than those on vaccines (46 studies) [ 18 ] in the MENA region. Besides, the low number of studies on public health intervention might be partly related to low public investment in public health interventions coupled with an industry-low interest in such interventions, considering that industry has contributed a large portion (32%) of the funding for economic evaluation studies in other regions [ 83 ].…”

“…The researchers also excluded the full economic evaluation studies on vaccines (unless screening was one of the comparators) and diagnostic and therapeutic interventions. These interventions were reviewed separately in other manuscripts to ensure harmony and consistency of compared studies, thus, gaining more insight into the specific characteristics of each group of interventions [ 18 , 19 ].…”

“…Each reporting quality criterion was rated as reported (score = +), not reported if the item was missing when expected to be reported (score = −) or not applicable (NA). Subsequently, studies were classified by their percentage of applicable items as "excellent", "high", "average", or "poor" quality when they fulfilled 100%, 76–99%, 50–75%, or less than 50% of the CHEERS checklist items, respectively [ 18 ]. The overall quality of reporting was presented as a percentage score of applicable items.…”