Patient and public involvement (PPI) can be used in methods research, as well as applied research, in health economics. However, methods research goals may seem quite abstract when compared to the lived experiences of lay participants. This article draws on 4 years of PPI in a research project to develop methods for including family carer outcomes in economic evaluation. Key challenges in using PPI for health economics methods research relate to (1) training and preparation, (2) maintaining involvement, and (3) selecting suitable tasks. We suggest three criteria for selecting a research task for PPI input based on task importance, professional researcher skills gap, and potential PPI contribution.
Family carer outcomes can be included in cost-utility analysis by estimating carer quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) generated from an intervention, alongside patient QALYs (Goodrich et al., 2012;Lavelle et al., 2019). The QALYs calculated for carers are typically derived from instruments that capture health-related quality of life (HRQoL;Guets et al., 2020;Wittenberg et al., 2019), with the EQ-5D being the most widely used of these (Wittenberg et al., 2019). However, carers value attributes other than health; especially since caring has important social and relational dimensions that may be missed by common HRQoL instruments (Al-Janabi et al., 2011a). Preference-based measures, such as the Carer Experience Scale (CES; Al-Janabi et al., 2008) and the CarerQoL-7D (Brouwer et al., 2006) capture care-related quality of
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