Details descriptions of the session:
Severity serves an important role in health care priority setting, being part of priority frameworks and functioning as a modifier for cost-effectiveness thresholds in health jurisdictions like The Netherlands, the UK, Norway, and Sweden. This session aims to present central ethical and conceptual issues of using severity as a priority-setting principle in health care, drawing on research from two related projects: Just Severity (Sweden) and Severity in Priority Setting in Health Care (SEVPRI; Norway). The session will present novel theoretical and empirical results on what severity is and on how it can be understood by the public. Topics include:
- Which is the theoretical basis for severity?
- How should severity relate to: temporality of illness, adaptation to illness, intra- and interpersonal aggregation, risk, heterogeneity and indirect severity, significant others, childhood, end-of-life and death, etc.?
- “Severity confers priority” is a common intuition, but what does the term severity mean in this proposition? Our research projects have probed this issue, capturing and quantifying citizens’ differing views
Learning objectives and target audience:
Our objectives are to (i) deepen attendees’ understanding of severity as a criterion in health care priority setting, including key ethical debates and issues of conceptualizing severity and (ii) stimulate further discussion.
The session will be of interest for researchers in ethics, health economics, policy research, as well as practitioners involved in priority setting where severity is a relevant criterion or is being considered for incorporation into existing priority-setting frameworks.
Structure of presentations:
- Brief overview of the SEVPRI and JUST SEVERITY research projects – Mathias Barra and Lars Sandman
- Overview of ethical and conceptual issues with severity – Lars Sandman
- Adaptation, limited aggregation, and severity – Borgar Jølstad
- Severity and death – Adam Ehlert
- Subjective accounts of severity: a mixed-methods investigation of differing accounts of severity – Mathias Barra & David Whitehurst
- Panel discussion and Q&A (moderated by Lars Sandman & Mathias Barra)
