Interpreting reported health-care benefits

When reading published reports on the benefits of different treatments or health-care programmes, readers are generally interested in judging the applicability of the results to their own settings. Thus they need to be able to identify what consequences (and costs) were included in the evaluation. This short paper describes the different categories of 'benefit' that may arise from health-care interventions and explains some of the methodological considerations in their measurement. It provides simple advice on avoiding the common pitfalls when interpreting the value offered by a particular treatment or configuration of health services.