CFP: The Value of Health. New Trends in Public Health and Health Equity Research

The conference aims at bringing together researchers from philosophy, the social and the medical sciences working on the understanding and measurement of public health and principles for allocation of health care resources (nationally as well as globally). Questions of resource allocation have become especially urgent due to technological progress, as ever new and more sophisticated – but also costly – treatments and diagnostic tools become available. This increases the need for priority setting, and thus for accurate assessments of the costs and benefits of specific drugs and interventions, as well as for sound and feasible ethical principles on which to base procedures and choices. The financial crisis and the growing pressure on the national welfare states, brought about in part also by the rise in life expectancy, have further increased the urgency of the problem. Yet even a considerable boost in public spending would not make it go away, since investments in public health tends to engender new costs. The role of expertise – medical and economic, as well as philosophical – in health policy making also remains controversial and underresearched.

The issue of just and efficient distribution of health care resources calls for an interdisciplinary approach, as it has closely interwoven economic, psychological, cultural, political and philosophical aspects. We wish to emphasize the latter, as we think there is a particular need for taking on foundational issues. But we also see a need for methodological innovation more broadly, and for keeping research informed by the latest trends in the field – and so we also emphatically welcome contributions from other fields, like economy, anthropology, public health research and political theory.

Topics to be discussed include, but are not limited to, the following:

- The value of health

- The practical implications of different notions of health, health equity and health justice

- Principles and systems for priority setting and resource allocation (from both theoretical and empirical points of view)

- Methodological issues in health/economic evaluation and prioritization

Keynote speaker: Daniel M. Hausman (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

We invite submissions of anonymised abstracts (300-500 words). Please send your abstract to [email protected] before February 26, 2018.

A moderate conference fee will be charged to cover meals etc.