Health economics training in the Autumn
I’m more or less back full time from an interesting summer break — Marta and I decided that going to a conference two 7-hours flight away, with two children (7 and not even 2 years old) was, if not a good idea, something we ought to try. In the event, it did go well, I think — we spent a bit of time visiting Malaysia and then “attended” the ISI World Conference. I think to be fair “attended” really only applies to our own sessions (I was in one and Marta in another), although we did get to spend a bit of time in the conference too.
Interestingly, Malaysia welcomed us with a very interesting surprise — we’ve flown into KL, driven four hours to get to Penang (incidentally, note to self: not a great idea to have to drive four hours after 14 hours on a plane…). By 7.30pm (to be very generous) we were all pretty knackered and so got to bed very early. But by 10pm a typhoon hit the island. Apart from Kobi (7 yo who slept through it all and wouldn’t believe me that it had happen, were it not for the fallen trees), we all woke up and frankly got a bit scared. In the end it wasn’t too bad and I think they managed to keep the damage to people and things to a very minimum (in fact, I was super-impressed by how the Malaysian dealt with it all and the general organisation of the country!).
Anyway, while navigating through the pile of unreplied emails I am still climbing, I notice a couple of events worth a shout.
The first one is a 2-day workshop on Introduction to R for Health Services Research, organised by the friends at DARTH in Toronto. The workshop is going to be held on 8-9th October and is aimed at novice R users and will cover data manipulation, visualization, regression modelling, hypothesis testing, functions, loops and reproducible research in R. Relevant information and details for registration are here.
The second one, I didn’t really “notice” looking at my emails, as I did know about it — and also, will be involved in it too. Although for once I’ll only have a marginal role and teach in, what I think is, the final lecture. That’s the annual two-day short course: Methods for addressing missing data in health economic evaluation, organised by Manuel at UCL. This course is aimed at health economists, statisticians, policy advisors and other analysts with an interest in health economic evaluation, who would like to expand their tool kit. It is anticipated that participants will be interested in undertaking or interpreting cost-effectiveness analyses that use patient-level data, either from clinical trials or observational data.