A study of the relationship between infectious diseases and health economics: some evidences from Nepal

ObjectiveTo measure the effectiveness of short term trainings in improving knowledge of health economics and application of economic way of thinking in policy research.MethodsThe training focused to strengthen the capacity of public health practitioners to design and implement health policy and programmes especially for infectious diseases from health system and economic perspectives. We focused to measure the effects of gaining knowledge to understand the relationship between infectious diseases and poverty and to adopt a logical way of thinking to come up with a solution. This approach used in this paper to measure the “reflection” of the training is different from conventional way of evaluating training programmes. The effectiveness of the training was measured in three dimensions: (i) general understanding of economics from health policy perspective; (ii) application of economic analysis and appraisal tools and techniques; and (iii) economic way of thinking for issues related to disease control and poverty.ResultsThere was a significant improvement in self-assessed knowledge after the training. Among seven knowledge related questions, in the pre-test, an average participant made 86% correct answers while in post-test, this figure increased to 100%. The results showed that there is a significant improvement in these three dimensions after the training intervention.ConclusionsThe paper concluded that endogenizing knowledge of economics and way of thinking have important implications for designing alternative policy and resource utilization.