The UK-Egypt Pharmacoeconomics Partnership
The UK-Egypt Pharmacoeconomics Partnership was designed to support the development of health economics expertise amongst 20 Egyptian pharmacists and health professionals, with a special emphasis on: (i) improving population health, (ii) promoting economic well-being, and (iii) gender equality in the training of a new health economics workforce.
The project has helped develop new skills in the economic evaluation of healthcare interventions, particularly amongst female academics and healthcare professionals in Egypt. 16 out of our 20 participants were female and the Egyptian lead was Professor Samar Farid from Cairo University. Our participants developed new skills in pharmacoeconomics and currently use them in teaching, research and health service decision-making.
EQ-5D project
With support from Professor Baines from Bournemouth University, Professor Samar’s team of five female academics applied to collaborate with the prestigious EUROQOL group, which is the international body that leads on the development of the EQ-5D (a group of instruments designed to described and value health). T
The application was accepted, and our Newton Fund activities have allowed Professor Farid’s team to become the first group of researchers in a Middle East country to start developing new quality of life values specific to an Arab country. The use of the new societal values for the EQ-5D will improve the appropriateness of health outcome measurement in Egypt and will give decision-makers better data for selecting the most cost-effective treatments for patients nationwide.
Impact
The Newton Fund was awarded to the UK-Egypt Pharmacoeconomics Partnership to help overcome the barriers to performing health economics studies by: (i) increasing in-country capacity that could disseminate knowledge to others, (ii) developing an Egyptian version of the EQ-5D to make comparisons between different diseases and alternative treatments, (iii) promoting equality by focusing on the development of female participants and focusing on hearing the voices of underrepresented groups in Egypt.