Economic Evaluations of Suicide Prevention - A Review of the Empirical Literature with Focus on How to Value Suicide Prevention
2023 (English)In: Journal of Mental Health Policy and Economics, ISSN 1091-4358, E-ISSN 1099-176X, Vol. 26, no Suppl. 1, p. S28-S28Article in journal, Meeting abstract (Other academic) Published
Abstract [en]
Background: In Sweden, suicide is the most common external cause of death and is accounting for a growing share of potential years of life lost due to injuries. To help policymakers in how to prioritize interventions to reduce the number of the suicides, there is a need for economic evaluations. However, the number of economic evaluations of suicide prevention is scarce. One reason for this can be an insecurity about how to include a reduction in the suicide rate.
Aims of the Study: The aim of this paper is to review the literature of economic evaluations for suicide prevention, with a specific focus on the methods used to value the benefits from the intervention.
Methods: A literature review based on searches in the electronic bibliographic databases: PubMed, Web of Science and Google Scholar, from 2000 until October 2022. The search was independently conducted by two separate researchers. The goal was to identify papers which contained an original economic evaluation of an intervention aimed at preventing suicides that was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Results: Our final search resulted in 515 hits, including duplicates. Most studies were excluded after the first screening of the abstracts and titles. The most common reason for exclusion was that the study did not evaluate an intervention for suicide prevention. A total of 13 papers was included in the final analysis.
Discussion and Conclusion: We find that there is a lack of economic evaluations of interventions to reduce the number of suicides. Furthermore, the ones that do exist varies both in quality and in which methods that are being used to measure and value the outcome.
Implications for Further Research: For the economic evaluations to be comparable and thereby helping policymakers to answer the question which intervention that is most cost-effective to reduce the number of suicides there is a need for standardization and methodological improvements.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
John Wiley & Sons, 2023. Vol. 26, no Suppl. 1, p. S28-S28
National Category
Psychiatry
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-106815ISI: 000998992600051OAI: oai:DiVA.org:oru-106815DiVA, id: diva2:1784629
Conference
Sixteenth Workshop on Costs and Assessment in Psychiatry ‘Mental Health Outcomes, Services, Economics, Policy Research’, Venice, Italy, March 24-26, 2023
2023-07-282023-07-282024-01-02Bibliographically approved