Systematic Review of the Relative Social Value of Child and Adult Health

Treatment Preferences for Acute Allergic Reactions: A Discrete Choice Experiment

“…There is reason to believe that inclusion of children may have increased the WTP for the oral film, as there is some evidence in the literature that indicates higher WTP within populations of children compared with adult populations. 28 This is an aspect that should be addressed in further research. It has been argued that the stated preference methodology, such as DCE, is especially suitable for assessment of acute conditions, where it is difficult to design clinical trials with the purpose to capture the health impairment of a short-term acute event.…”

Rationale, conceptual issues, and resultant protocol for a mixed methods Person Trade Off (PTO) and qualitative study to estimate and understand the relative value of gains in health for children and young people compared to adults

“…The reasons why people might give preference to treating patients of different ages are multiple and complex [ 11 ]. Incorporating a qualitative and deliberative component is important to help understand these reasons, and to delve behind respondents’ initial answers to understand the robustness of their preferences.…”

“…A common childhood age used in the literature is 10 years old, therefore including this category would enable a direct comparison of findings. The recent systematic review [ 11 ] identified gaps in the evidence base in relation to very young children (<5 years) and young adults (18–24 years). It also identified a non-linear relationship between age and social value (lower for the very young children and adolescents compared with primary school age children) which suggests there would be a benefit to including many different young ages within the study.…”

“…Internal consistency may be judged by comparing PTO answers against other methods for eliciting aged-based preferences such as opinion questions and ranking. However, past evidence suggests fairly systematic differences across research methods with ranking more often being linearly related to age, and opinion surveys responses more likely to reflect a preference for equal treatment [ 11 ]. Therefore, these indirect comparisons cannot say much about data quality.…”

“…Age has been proposed as a potential patient characteristic that should be taken into consideration [ 9 , 10 ]. A recent systematic review synthesized the international evidence on societal views on the relative social value of child versus adult health gains [ 11 ]. This review identified outstanding uncertainties in the relative social value of health gains across the full infant to older adolescent age range, inconsistencies in the findings based on research method, and a lack of understanding of the drivers behind these inconsistencies and of individuals’ motivations when responding to stated preference questions relating to relative social value.…”