Mathematical Sciences Seminar - A mathematician dips her toes into politics...
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
No booking required
The goals of policy makers for health policy need to be understood when extensive health reform is on a country’s political agenda. In eliciting goals, we need to balance the amount of information gathered with requirements of speed and feasibility in informing policy making. The US health care system may once again undergo large-scale reform but it will be difficult to enact policies to bring about desired change without common ground on health policy goals.
We first designed a rapid survey for state legislators in 2017 who serve on committees that deal with health policy to assess their priorities for health policy. We used an explicit ranking method, asking legislators to rank their priorities among 13 possible goals of health policy. The goals were iteratively developed through stakeholder engagement with policy experts and a focus group of state legislators. Alongside the distribution of ranks assigned to each goal, individual legislator rankings were combined into an overall ranking using two statistical methods: a hierarchy of pairwise goal preferences and ordinal multi-dimensional scaling. Differences in rankings between groups of legislators were assessed using standard statistical tests. The results were fascinating – both to me and to the politicians and academic experts working in US health policy.
In this talk I will discuss how I ended up doing the survey and how relatively simple mathematics can be useful to clarify high level political policy debates.
Contact name:
Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics