Just starting out

I am a health economist. A total newbie, four months into a shiny new career, and I want to write about it. Hopefully in a way that helps inform people, but also just for myself, as a way of taking a step back and looking at the big picture. It’s easy, in the day-to-day, to get caught up in the little detail of your tiny corner of the field. I’d hate to end up myopic. I’ve been meaning to start something like this for ages, but other things - including just a lack of drive - have had a tendency to get in the way. I also want to write because, although there are some great blogs on health economics, they tend to fall into a couple of categories, and I feel something is missing.

First, the specific, academic interests. My colleague, James Buchanan, writes an excellent blog on economic evaluation and genetics. He reviews papers and conferences and discusses his work and other points of interest, and occasionally argues with other people keeping similar blogs. It’s interesting to find out about the field from a less specialist point of view, but still requires a level of knowledge that limits readership to the academic community, by and large.

At the other end of the spectrum are blogs like the Incidental Economist, written by Aaron Carroll, who also writes for the New York Times and vlogs at Healthcare Triage, and who has achieved enormous popularity with a witty and accessible style that brings both health economics and wider medical and health policy news to anyone who’s interested.

Beyond this, there’s also an endless stream of pharma-focussed news, of course. That’s way outside anything I’d aspire to cover. There’s also the policy side, which bloggers from NGOs and charities like the King’s Fund and Health Foundation tend to have covered pretty well, although there’s probably room for a bit more that’s specifically economic. To get an overview of the whole thing, it’s worth checking out the Academic Health Economist’s Network, which aggregates most of the blogging output of the field, as well as news and beyond.

So, where do I want to slot in?

I guess I want to talk about the field in general, in a way that is accessible to anyone with an interest, but that doesn’t just go over what any general interest post would do. I want to talk about how decisions in health care are made, in the UK, of course, but also further afield. I want to use this space to think about the field more broadly than what I work on day-to-day, although of course I want to cover that as well.

So, that’s the plan. As with all things, we’ll see how it goes. Hopefully you’ll find it interesting, or at least not dull or impenetrable. Who knows, it might even be fun.