Rationing Health Care During a Pandemic

Rationing Health Care During a Pandemic: What role did priority setting play in the response to Covid-19?

In the latest of the HSMC at 50 Seminars, Professor Iestyn Williams, Professor Suzanne Robinson and Professor Helen Dickinson will look at the role that allocation of resources has played during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

COVID has presented unique and heightened resource allocation challenges for governments across the world, forcing them to make explicit decisions about the use of scarce resources such as personal protective equipment, COVID-19 tests, vaccines, intensive care services and staff.  In this session we will present:

• Early findings from a comparative analysis of the role of priority setting in pandemic preparedness plans
• Analysis of the implications of these resource decisions for disability policy and practice

Speaker Bios

Iestyn Williams is a Professor of Health Policy and Management and Director of Research for the School of Social Policy.

He specialises in social science approaches to health services research, employing mixed methods study designs.

Helen Dickinson is a Professor of Public Service Research at the School of Business, UNSW Canberra. 

Her expertise is in public services, particularly in relation to topics such as disability policy and practice, the future of the public service workforce and governance of fourth industrial revolution technologies. 

Professor Suzanne Robinson is lead for the Health Economics and Data Analytics Discipline and co-Director of the Curtin Health Research and Data Analytics Hub at Curtin University.

She received the ACHSM Innovation and Excellence Award for her work in health system research and capacity building. 

Throughout 2022, we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Health Services Management Centre at the University of Birmingham. This is 50 years of being one of the UK’s foremost centres for research and evaluation, teaching and professional development for health and social care organisations. 50 years of being a “critical friend” of the healthcare community and striving to bridge the gap between research and practice.