Assignment:
Steps to Performing the Assignment
1. Decide what health condition you will investigate. This should be the main condition that your health intervention treats. For example, if your health intervention helps people find safe, nutritious food, the condition could be acute food poisoning (unsafe food) or chronic malnutrition (lack of nutritious food).
You must specifiy whether your condition is a chronic (lasts forever) or temporary condition. For the math to work, it is important that this condition be preferred to being dead (there are fates worse than death!) Some examples are listed below, but you are free to choose any medical, mental, social or otherwise health-related condition that is of interest to your group.
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Chronic
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Temporary
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Malnutrition
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Food Poisoning
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Opiate Addiction
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Drug Overdose
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Loneliness and Isolation
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Lack of Language Skills
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Quadruplegia
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Broken Leg
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Chronic Depression
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Influenza
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2. If you choose a temporary condition, make sure that it is worse than heartburn. You will be using heartburn (acid reflux), with a known QALY of 0.82, as your comparison condition in calculations. If the condition you choose is NOT worse than heartburn, some of the questions in the default questionnaires won't give the right result.
3. Write a description for your chosen condition (and for heartburn, if you chose a temporary health state). This description must be short, easy to understand, and able to convey to the people being interviewed what the condition is like. They must be able to imagine themselves suffering from the condition.
4. Prepare your questionnaires. You may modify the ones provided, or create your own. If you are interviewing people whose first language is not English, it's fine to have your questions in another language - just be sure to provide English translations in addition to the originals when you hand in your assignment.
5. Conduct your interviews and write down data.
6. Perform the QALY calculations (similar to those in Lecture 7).
7. As a team, discuss the results and write your discussion, summary and conclusion. You can always ask the instructor for help if you need it! Either ask in class, or e-mail [email protected].
8. Edit the report and hand it in.