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Exploration of the costs of accessing health services: data from a longitudinal study of young people in transition from paediatric to adult services

BACKGROUND: Economic evaluations that include the patient perspective often base their estimates of patient time and travel costs on data collected at a single point in time. This, however, may be inaccurate if the costs of accessing care change substantially over time, as may be the case for young...

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Autores principales: Simpson, Julija, Robinson, Tomos, Vale, Luke
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7981799/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33743694
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-06280-z
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author Simpson, Julija
Robinson, Tomos
Vale, Luke
author_facet Simpson, Julija
Robinson, Tomos
Vale, Luke
author_sort Simpson, Julija
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Economic evaluations that include the patient perspective often base their estimates of patient time and travel costs on data collected at a single point in time. This, however, may be inaccurate if the costs of accessing care change substantially over time, as may be the case for young people in transition from paediatric to adult health services. AIMS: The aim of this study was to explore the differences in these time and travel costs between two data collection points for young individuals in transition between health care services, and thus to provide an insight of whether such costs should be collected more than once. METHODS: Descriptive statistics and regression modelling were used to estimate the average difference in costs between the two points of data collection, as well as the potential drivers of those cost differences. RESULTS: We found a small difference in costs between the two time points, equal to -£45.78 [95% CI: − 89.70 to − 1.86]. The results were largely driven by changes in the unit cost of visits and in the number of attendances. CONCLUSIONS: A simple and common assumption that patient costs could be collected at a single time point cannot be made in the context of our study. When deciding on the frequency of elicitation of patient costs, future studies should consider the relative impacts of additional data collection on the estimates of efficiency, inequalities and resource implications for collecting new data. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12913-021-06280-z.
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spelling pubmed-79817992021-03-22 Exploration of the costs of accessing health services: data from a longitudinal study of young people in transition from paediatric to adult services Simpson, Julija Robinson, Tomos Vale, Luke BMC Health Serv Res Research Article BACKGROUND: Economic evaluations that include the patient perspective often base their estimates of patient time and travel costs on data collected at a single point in time. This, however, may be inaccurate if the costs of accessing care change substantially over time, as may be the case for young people in transition from paediatric to adult health services. AIMS: The aim of this study was to explore the differences in these time and travel costs between two data collection points for young individuals in transition between health care services, and thus to provide an insight of whether such costs should be collected more than once. METHODS: Descriptive statistics and regression modelling were used to estimate the average difference in costs between the two points of data collection, as well as the potential drivers of those cost differences. RESULTS: We found a small difference in costs between the two time points, equal to -£45.78 [95% CI: − 89.70 to − 1.86]. The results were largely driven by changes in the unit cost of visits and in the number of attendances. CONCLUSIONS: A simple and common assumption that patient costs could be collected at a single time point cannot be made in the context of our study. When deciding on the frequency of elicitation of patient costs, future studies should consider the relative impacts of additional data collection on the estimates of efficiency, inequalities and resource implications for collecting new data. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12913-021-06280-z. BioMed Central 2021-03-21 /pmc/articles/PMC7981799/ /pubmed/33743694 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-06280-z Text en © The Author(s) 2021 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research Article
Simpson, Julija
Robinson, Tomos
Vale, Luke
Exploration of the costs of accessing health services: data from a longitudinal study of young people in transition from paediatric to adult services
title Exploration of the costs of accessing health services: data from a longitudinal study of young people in transition from paediatric to adult services
title_full Exploration of the costs of accessing health services: data from a longitudinal study of young people in transition from paediatric to adult services
title_fullStr Exploration of the costs of accessing health services: data from a longitudinal study of young people in transition from paediatric to adult services
title_full_unstemmed Exploration of the costs of accessing health services: data from a longitudinal study of young people in transition from paediatric to adult services
title_short Exploration of the costs of accessing health services: data from a longitudinal study of young people in transition from paediatric to adult services
title_sort exploration of the costs of accessing health services: data from a longitudinal study of young people in transition from paediatric to adult services
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7981799/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33743694
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-06280-z
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