Measuring national productivity impacts of chronic ill health on patients and carers and the potential benefits of health and policy interventions

While health has a substantial impact on wellbeing, many health conditions also have significant impacts on productivity, in many cases costing more than costs to the health system, with lifetime impacts . This is a substantial limitation when demonstrating the potential benefits of innovative new treatments and prevention of disease. The project aims to design a novel composite national metric taking account of annual and lifetime impacts of lost productivity due to chronic illness. Within this metric we will take account of lifetime productivity impacts of chronic illness as well as mortality and the impacts on carers who also need to leave the workforce to care for their family members. We will develop a new microsimulation model, Health&ProductivityMOD, to quantify health-related productivity costs across the lifecourse, including impacts on educational attainment, lost income and savings (including superannuation), poverty, welfare dependency, lost taxation and GDP. The proposed model will be an international first providing a powerful tool to comprehensively model the cost of chronic ill health and simulate the potential productivity impacts of health interventions and policy options related to health and productivity. This will provide answers to critical policy questions for government with potential significant economic benefits