Using best-worst scaling to inform policy decisions in Africa: a literature review.

Background: Stakeholder engagement in policy decision-making is critical to inform required trade-offs, especially in low-and-middle income settings, such as many African countries. Discrete-choice experiments are now commonly used to engage stakeholders in policy decisions, but other methods such as best-worst scaling (BWS), a theory-driven prioritization technique, could be equally important. We sought to document and explore applications of BWS to assess stakeholder priorities in the African context to bring attention to BWS as a method and to assess how and why it is being used to inform policy.

Public health impact and cost effectiveness of mass vaccination with live attenuated human rotavirus vaccine (RIX4414) in India: model based analysis.

Objectives: To examine the public health impact of mass vaccination with live attenuated human rotavirus vaccine (RIX4414) in a birth cohort in India, and to estimate the cost effectiveness and affordability of such a programme.

Design: Decision analytical Markov model encompassing all direct medical costs. Infection risk and severity depended on age, number of previous infections, and vaccination history; probabilities of use of inpatient and outpatient health services depended on symptom severity.