EuHEA 2022 Conference

Here for my usual monthly update! This month I have some exciting news as I had the pleasure to attend the EuHEA 2022 Conference in Oslo between 5-8 July. It was my first time attending this biannaul conference and I must say I really enjoyed the event and the location. Oslo is a beautiful city and the conference was held at the perfect time of the year with very sunny and mild temperatures throughout the whole week. I even I had the chance to explore the city and nearabouts one day: I visit some museums (including the famous sream from Munch!), I enjoyed the mild wheather and nice coastline view, and walked through some of the most beautiful parks I have ever seen.

But wait, that’s not all! As one of the antendee of the conference, I was also invited and greated by the major of the city to visit the town hall of the city with an amazing refreshment party before the start of the conference and, icing on the cake, I had a lovely dinner inside the national opera house! It was incredible!

Now, leaving impotant things aside, let me talk a bit about the actual conference. The event was super well organised with multiple parallel sessions that were consecutively held in different buildings of the Blindern campus of the University of Oslo. The audience was quite large with scholars, people working in the industry and health economists coming from all over the world to discuss their reserach or applied works. Each session has a specific theme and all presenations within the sessions were tied together by the theme topic. Unfortunately for me, my session was the last one of the last day and it was related to methodological work in health economics. The session was very interesting, with three other talks beside my own one, all related to quantitative aspects of collecting, analysing and interpreting the results based on health economics data. My talk was about recent VIH paper on missing data methods in economic evaluations and, I must say, took the interest of a few people in the audience with lots of questions and interesting suggestions for future work. I was also able to follow the other presentations in my session with great interest as they were related to topics I am kind of familiar with, including methods for the generation of value sets for EQ-5D questionnaires and value of information analysis methods. It was a pity that some of the attendees could not attend the last session (also because it was the day after the conference dinner) but, overall, I feel quite satisfied with the feedback I received on my work.

Among all, I must mention some special and familiar faces who I met at the conference: the lovely Chris Sampson from the Office of Health Economics, author and manager of the wonderful The academic health economists’ blog which I really recommend to follow if you want to keep updated about research in health economics; the dear and my previous PhD supervisor Rachael Hunter from the department of PCPH of UCL together with her husband and also health economist Matt Franklin; many other colleagues from different places of the Netherlands who I happened to recognise from our last encounter at the lolaHESG 2022 Conference. Finally, I also would like to sincerely thank the director of CAPHRI Silvia Evers, who provided some very nice comments and questions during my session and with whom I had the pleasure to exchange some words about possible future reserach collaboration and projects here at Maastricht University. She was really interested in my work and I would love to keep working with her and her team in the field of economic evaluations as I believe there is plenty of room for extending current methodological and applied work in the context of CEA.

So, overall, I must say I really enjoyed the conference and the international atmosphere surrounding the event. I also had the chance to network a bit with few colleagues from different countries who had interest in my own research or with whom I was able to find some common point of interest. Well, I guess that’s the end for my golden period this year as I am afraid I will not be able to attend other conferences this year. Now it is time to get back to work and figure out some new projects and grant proposals to write so that I can attend even more conferences next years! Wish me good luck!