Symposium – The value of prevention: Calculating benefits and costs

Health Prevention programs and interventions have the potential to generate substantial societal benefit. These benefits are too often ignored in the policy debate, where the focus tends to be on health care costs only. A motion passed in the Dutch Parliament, as well as several commissions and organizations like the Social Economic Council have urged for a better consideration of benefits and costs of prevention, through the development of adequate models and instruments that introduce these into the policy making process on a regular basis. At the same time, calculating the societal value of prevention measures is hard: many prevention measures cannot be evaluated using randomized trials and the benefits of prevention often only materialize in the long-run and outside of the health care sector. 

Rotterdam School of Management: J3-43