FAQ 1
What is the time commitment involved for the “live” DCEA Course?
The “live” DCEA Course is based on five modules which take place over five weeks. You should plan on making about 4 or 5 hours available per week – about 1.5 hours of video material, 1 hour to do the exercise, 1 hour ‘live’ Q&A session and 1 or 2 hours for reading and discussion board interaction, totalling 20 to 25 hours altogether. But this will vary from person to person as self-paced study will take more or less time depending on prior experience and how far you wish to engage in optional extra exercises and reading. Please note that students are encouraged to ensure that they have sufficient time set aside to keep up with the content and get the most out of the course and live support.
FAQ 2
What is the time commitment involved for the “on demand” DCEA Course?
The “on demand” DCEA Course is based on five modules which students complete at their own pace over 2 months. Each module involves a time commitment of around 3 to 4 hours – about 1.5 hours of video material, 1 hour to do the exercise and 1 or 2 hours for reading, totalling 15 to 20 hours altogether. But this will vary from person to person as self-paced study will take more or less time depending on prior experience and how far you wish to engage in optional extra exercises and reading. Please note that students are encouraged to ensure that they have sufficient time set aside to fully explore and revisit the content during the 2-month access period.
FAQ 3
When is payment for the course fee due for the “live” course?
The course fee is payable in advance. Payment is accepted by card or by bank transfer. To register, please complete the registration form linked on the relevant course page, following which you will receive an automated email containing your invoice (and receipt if paying by card) and further instructions. Please note that in order to be able to access the content, payment of the invoice must be received no later than by 8am BST on the course start date.
FAQ 4
When is payment for the course fee due for the “on demand” course?
The course fee is payable in advance. Payment is accepted by card or by bank transfer. To register, please complete the registration form linked on the relevant course page, following which you will receive an automated email containing your invoice (and receipt if paying by card) and further instructions. If you pay by card, you will be enrolled on the course within a few days and will be able to start working through the content straight away. If paying by invoice, you will be enrolled on the course once the invoice has been paid and then you can start working on the content. Your enrolment will remain in place for 2 months.
FAQ 5
Does the course fee include VAT?
No, the course fee is VAT-exempt.
FAQ 6
Is the course ECTS-credit eligible?
No, the course is not credit eligible.
FAQ 7
The course description states that familiarity with Microsoft Excel is essential: exactly what constitutes familiarity?
The course involves exercises structured within the Microsoft Excel(TM) spreadsheet package. It is therefore essential that participants are familiar with the basic concepts of manipulating spreadsheets: copy and pasting, using formulae and functions to link cells together, dragging cells to create a series etc. However, the exercises do not involve specialised functions such as Visual Basic Macros or the vlookup(.) command, and all the graphs and tables have been designed and formatted in advance so you can concentrate on interpreting the results rather than fiddling with layouts, font sizes and so on. The only specialised function used is a data table, used for sensitivity analysis around equity-efficiency trade-offs, and this operates in the background so you do not have to learn how to create this yourself. All of the exercises we will cover in the course are included in the book “Distributional Cost-Effectiveness Analysis: Quantifying Health Equity Impacts and Trade-Offs” and are available online. If you are concerned about your familiarity with Excel, then have a look at the core Exercises 8 (short version), 9 (short version) and 13 ahead of time. You will enjoy the course more, and get more out of the exercises, if you have a reasonable level of Excel proficiency such that you can concentrate on the concepts underlying the exercise rather than learning Excel as you go along.
FAQ 8
Are there any reading recommendations to make sure my knowledge is sufficient for the DCEA course?
The course is based around the book “Distributional Cost-Effectiveness Analysis: Quantifying Health Equity Impacts and Trade-Offs” edited by Richard Cookson, Ole Norheim, Susan Griffin and Anthony Culyer, Oxford University Press, 2021. Most of the course exercises are included in this book, but there is no need to attempt the exercises ahead of time. Course participants should be familiar with the basic principles of health economic evaluation, as set out for example in “Methods for the Economic Evaluation of Health Care Programmes” by Drummond MF, Sculpher M, Claxton K, Stoddart GL, Torrance GW. (4th ed), Oxford University Press, 2015, which is informally known as the Drummond “blue book”.
FAQ 9
Why does the online course fee not include a free copy of the course book?
This is due to complicated logistics around the ordering of personal copies, involving either hard copy postage and packing or processing personal data on e-book account details, and the time burden this would place upon administrative staff. We did look into options for automating the book ordering process via Oxford University Press, but could not find any way of doing this that is not unduly time consuming. We apologise that we were not able to resolve this issue, though hope that most participants will have free online access via their institutional library.
FAQ 10
What time are the "live" Q&A sessions, and can you run additional sessions for my time zone?
The “live” version of the DCEA course features live Q&A sessions via Zoom from 1pm to 2pm UK time on Thursdays. Unfortunately, we are unable to run live sessions at other times; therefore, those that are unable to make this time slot or are in time zones substantially distant from the UK are advised to sign up for the “on demand” version of the course.
FAQ 11
Are there versions of the exercises in R as well as Excel?
No, though the R code underpinning our health inequality impact tool for doing simple "aggregate" DCEA is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/bitowaqr/dcea. If there is sufficient demand we may consider running a parallel version of the exercises in R in future years, as has been done in some of the other short courses. However, people familiar with coding in R or Python or other programming languages will find it straightforward to learn the basic analytical concepts of DCEA in Excel and then code things up in their preferred programming language.