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Caring: the neglected health outcome? or input?
1Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation, University of Sydney, Australia.
Health Policy (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
|December 8, 1996
Summary
Caring is often overlooked in healthcare evaluations, especially economic assessments. This study emphasizes the need to include caring as both an input and outcome in healthcare evaluations.
Area of Science:
- Health economics
- Healthcare evaluation
- Sociology of care
Background:
- Caring is frequently omitted or undervalued in healthcare evaluations.
- Economic evaluations, in particular, often neglect caring as both an input and an outcome.
- Existing frameworks may not adequately capture the multifaceted nature of caring.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine the role and conceptualization of caring in healthcare evaluation.
- To assess how economics and other disciplines address caring.
- To advocate for the inclusion of caring in health economic studies.
Main Methods:
- Literature review of economic evaluation frameworks.
- Comparative analysis of how different disciplines conceptualize caring.
- Exploration of caring as both an input and an outcome.
Main Results:
- Caring is consistently underrepresented in healthcare and economic evaluations.
- Economics struggles to adequately incorporate the concept of caring.
- Other disciplines offer potentially richer frameworks for understanding caring.
Conclusions:
- There is a critical need to integrate caring more thoroughly into healthcare evaluation.
- Economic evaluations should broaden their conceptualization of costs and benefits to include caring.
- Interdisciplinary perspectives can enhance the evaluation of healthcare, particularly regarding caring.