By Tyrone Burke
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or at least that’s how the saying goes.
When it comes to preventive health care, there is no precise measure of the return on investment. Public health makes up a relatively small percentage of overall health-care spending, but how much money is spent on and saved through programs that encourage people to quit smoking, screen themselves for cancer, or wear a mask to prevent COVID-19 is unknown.
This is partly because it is inherently challenging to quantify the cost of care that isn’t delivered because illness is successfully prevented, but also because public health programs are delivered by a variety of different organizations, thus blurring the definition of public health.
“We can find public health in immigration policy, school vaccinations, and labour policy—think about legislation that protects workers,” says Prof. Mehdi Ammi, a health economist at Carleton’s School of Public Policy and Administration.
“But we don’t know the total that is spent on these interventions from all sources.”
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) recently awarded Ammi a three-year, $467,000 grant to develop health data to better understand the impact of public health spending, and inform future policy-making.
“The end goal is to identify how much is spent, such that we can measure how much return on investment we get from public health—the value for money,” says Ammi, who will lead the research with co-Principal Investigator Prof. Sara Allin, of the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and a group of Canadian public health decision-makers and international collaborators.