Speakers
Professor Emma Frew PhD, MSc, BA (Hons)
Emma is an NIHR Research Professor (awarded 2020) and Professor in Health Economics at the Institute of Applied Health Research.
Emma studied at The University of Strathclyde for a BA (Hons) in Economics and Marketing (1993-1997) and at The University of York for a MSc Health Economics (1997-1998). She joined the Economics Department, University of Nottingham in 1998 as a Research Assistant and during that time completed a PhD in Health Economics (1999-2003) under the supervision of Professor David Whynes and Dr Jane Wolstenholme. She joined the University of Birmingham in 2002.
Following her PhD, Emma was responsible for undertaking reviews of economic evidence as part of the NICE appraisal process and supporting clinical trials with economic evaluation.
In 2015 she was awarded a personal fellowship as a NIHR Career Development Fellow to work closely with Birmingham City Council Public Health team managing and developing services to help tackle childhood obesity. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2008, Reader in 2016 and Professor in 2019.
Using economics to generate a systems response to obesity – what’s it worth?
Often, the phrases ‘sustainability’ and ‘cost-effectiveness’ are used as important criteria to judge a new policy or intervention that addresses population obesity. What these terms mean in the context of working at a systems level remains an open question. Economics offers a framework to describe and analyse different interventions and their contribution towards achieving economic wellbeing. Economic tools can be used to explicitly define the ‘gainers and losers’ from a policy change, tracking how alternative uses of resources affect the allocation of population health.
Drawing on examples from the applied research across six workstreams (retail, blue/green space, education, active transport, modelling, workplace) within the Centre for Economics of Obesity, this talk will highlight the economic considerations and challenges, from working within multidisciplinary teams undertaking evaluations at a ‘system level’. Obesity is a complex condition, determined by risk factors linked to unhealthy diets and physical inactivity that are influenced by the social, economic, and environmental conditions that we live in. As such, the economic considerations are wide-ranging, and the analyses requires close partnership working with the key decision-makers. Ultimately the type of analyses depends on the research resources available, and the availability of data and information that can be difficult to acquire. With obesity research, policy makers are usually operating within a context of powerful competing interests, and the ‘economic argument’ is an important element to help justify an approach. In this talk, examples will be used to illustrate the type of economic analyses being conducted, the methodological challenges, and share the lessons learned from being a health economist working within obesity systems research.
UKSBM 2023
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