Economic evaluation of mental health service delivery systems

Presenter 

Yong Yi Lee - PhD Confirmation Review milestone presentation

Advisors 

Associate Professor Jan Barendregt (Principal Supervisor); Professor Harvey Whiteford, Ms Meredith Harris, Dr Carla Meurk, Associate Professor Cathrine Mihalopoulos and Professor Theo Vos (Associate Supervisors)

Overview

The Australian mental health system is often criticised for being overly complex and fragmented. This present day inefficiency is largely attributable to past reforms driven, more often than not, by perceived crises, sentinel events and lobbying. Improving the efficiency and equity of the mental health system requires a fair and effective means of allocating resources across the range of interventions that can cost-effectively reduce the burden of mental disorders. However, previous economic studies on interventions for mental disorders have had a limited impact on the mental health service delivery system. It follows that there is a need to develop a ‘service platform’ concept that can facilitate the translation of economic evidence for disorder-level interventions to aggregations of services that are meaningful to mental health policy makers. Furthermore, an update of the evidence regarding the cost-effectiveness of interventions for the prevention and treatment of major depression in the Australian population is needed.  This project aims to establish the optimal allocation of resources between different mental health service platforms to cost-effectively reduce the burden of major depression in the Australian population. This presentation marks the mid-point of the project and will cover project progress and plans for the following year.

Brief Bio

Yong Yi Lee is a PhD student at the UQ School of Public Health and has a background in public health and health economics. He received his Master in Health Economics (Advanced) from The University of Queensland in 2011. His research interests relate to mental health, epidemiological modelling and the application of economic evaluation methods.