The RAINDROP Study is making good progress. Chris and Rob have been liaising with Qa Research who will be conducting the questionnaire on behalf of the University of Newcastle.
The questionnaire is nearing completion and will be rolled out nationwide on 26th September.
Over a year since our last update, so we will try and keep this one short and sweet.
The project continues to make fantastic progress. Our first wave of questionnaires have been distributed, completed and returned. We are delighted to have a co-operative sample with lots of high quality data to work with! The analysis of data is ongoing, producing a lot of interesting results which we look forward to sharing with you.
Design of the second questionnaire is underway and the second wave of data collection should commence in February. We have an exciting meeting coming up with Cam Donaldson in Glasgow about some theoretical and methodological issues and we are very much looking forward to having a good discussion!
In other news we have gained a member of staff, Katherine Carr who is our new research assistant. She recently graduated from the University of Sheffield with an MSc in Economics and Health Economics, swapping cities with Robert Smith who continues to pursue his PhD with the School of Health and Related Research. Congratulations to you both!
Hopefully it won't be so long before our next update - keep on checking back for more progress reports.
Recently we were able to take some research output to the Health Economics Study Group (HESG) to Aberdeen. This paper focused on the first wave of data, where we compared two approaches to willingness to pay. If you want to read more about this particular research, you can read a summary over on the Health Economics Group blog (https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/healtheconomicsgroup/2017/07/04/hope-for-willingness-to-pay-analysis-of-the-incremental-approach/).
The HESG has a strange approach; instead of presenting your own research we submit our documents and someone else presents them. This year we had a PhD student, Dwayne Boyers, present our work. He had a really comprehensive understanding of what we were trying to achieve and some useful insights which lead to a constructive discussion! We are working on incorporating this feedback and hope to be submitting a paper soon.
So, thank you HESG and we look forward to seeing you again soon!
We have now concluded our priority setting process and are finalising the recommnedations.
We will launch the results of this at our Policy Findings Launch Event on 2nd April in London. For more information and to register, please check the Event page.