A life-course approach to measuring capability for economic evaluation of health and social care interventions

Health services face increasingly difficult decisions about which interventions to provide from available resources. These economic decisions currently concentrate on maximising health gain, but an important alternative is to focus on generating capability wellbeing. There are generic capability measures for assessing the effect of health interventions for adults, older people and those at end of life, but not for younger people. Extending capability measurement to children requires changes in thinking to a life-course approach that accepts differing values at different stages of life and to a focus on current wellbeing and future ‘well-becoming’, considering child measures in the context of development to adulthood. 

This research addresses these issues in a UK setting. It will generate, value and validate new measures of capability wellbeing for children, explore evidence on values during the life course and generate an integrated framework for measuring capability wellbeing/well-becoming and also explore end of life assessment in children.