Modelling the health-economic impact of the next influenza pandemic in The Netherlands

Abstract

To optimally develop or adjust national contingency plans to respond to the next influenza pandemic, we developed a decision type model and estimated the total health burden and direct medical costs during the next possible influenza pandemic in the Netherlands on the basis of health care burden during a regular epidemic. Using an arithmetic decision tree-type model we took into account population characteristics, varying influenza attack rates, health care consumption according to the Dutch health care model and all-cause mortality. Actual direct medical cost estimates were based on the Dutch guidelines for pharmaco-economic evaluation. In the base-case scenario with no preventive measure available and an average influenza attack rate of 30%, 4,958,188 influenza infections, 1,552,687 GP consultations, 83,515 hospitalizations and 173,396 deaths will take place in The Netherlands. The burden is highest in adults aged 20 to 64 years. If minimizing the total mortality and sustaining highest net economic returns is the objective, this group needs to be targeted in interventions.

Choosing pandemic parameters for pandemic preparedness planning: A comparison of pandemic scenarios prior to and following the influenza A(H1N1) 2009 pandemic

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“…Successful containment or mitigation of a pandemic relies on thorough preparedness. Therefore, preparedness including health care resource planning, is crucial [7]. As described by White and Angus, despite an "enormous global investment in preparing for the re-emergence of influenza A(H1N1) 2009, preparations proceeded without empirical data about the nature and severity of disease" [6].…”

Simulating school closure policies for cost effective pandemic decision making

“…Based on the 2009 Texas census data, we assumed that 20% of working adults are single parents [29]. Worker productivity loss due to school closure absenteeism was calculated according to the Human Capital Method, as in [3,4,34]: average salary plus benefits times the number of days work lost.…”

Mitigation of pandemic influenza: review of cost–effectiveness studies

“…We note the great impact of that one article on other papers included it in this review, either directly [14,17] or indirectly [15,[18][19][20]. The articles were evaluated and compared on various issues, including type of modeling and specific values for health-economic input variables.…”

“…Article abstracts were read and evaluated on their appropriateness for the review, and 16 articles were read in total. Of these, 12 articles were judged to adhere to the aforementioned inclusion criteria [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] and four were discarded from this review [26][27][28][29]. With one exception ( [22]), all reviewed articles were published in 2004 or later.…”