Welcome to Health England

Welcome to HealthEngland.org, the website for Health England: the national reference group for health and wellbeing.  Health England has a remit to take forward the recommendations in the White Paper 'Our health, our care, our say : a new direction for community services.

New Reports Published

Health England Report No 4 is now published.  May 2009.

Health England Reports No 2 and No 3 are now published.  March 2009.

New Project Update 2009:   Prioritising preventative health interventions for England

Across the world changes in demographics, technology, and public expectations are pushing medical costs up beyond each country’s ability to pay. Most countries are seeking to address this by investing more heavily in prevention. There is little evidence of how commissioners should spend their money to maximise the impact of preventative health care services. Health England have commissioned The Matrix Knowledge Group , working in collaboration with Imperial College London, Kings College London and Bazian Ltd, to undertake a research study to develop and apply a method for prioritising investments in preventative interventions for England.

Project overview

A Multi-Criteria Analysis will be undertaken to rank preventative health interventions. Specifically, this will comprise of the following four work streams:  

1.   Identification of interventions. Two lists of interventions will be produced:

a.   A long-list of all preventative health interventions is being constructed by reviewing publications from relevant organisations, as well as drawing on previous public health work undertaken by Matrix.

b.   A short-list of interventions to be included in the analysis. This list is being constructed through engagement with stakeholders.    

2.   Engagement with stakeholders to develop a prioritising method. Stakeholders will be engaged through two means: workshops and surveys. The objective of the engagement will be to identify the criteria decision-makers consider when assessing whether to invest in an intervention, and the relative values they attach to different criteria. The stakeholders included in this process are central government decision makers, and representatives of PCTs, SHAs, and Local Authorities. Stakeholder workshops have been organised for the following dates:   26^th May 2009.

3.   Collection of existing evidence on the relevant criteria. Evidence will be collected to measure each of the criteria for each short-listed intervention. Where evidence is not available within the extant literature, decision models will be constructed to fill these gaps in the evidence.  

4.   Multi-criteria analysis techniques will be employed to combined the criteria into one score that can be used to rank the interventions.

Website last updated:  June 2009