The Symposium on Valuing Life and Health (held on January 20-22 2025) aimed to investigate how difficult trade-offs in allocating public resources are best made, especially when impacts on life expectancy must be balanced against implications on health, wealth or other aspects of quality of life. 

There are some standard tools for making these trade-offs in policy decision-making: a measure of the ‘value of a statistical life’, and the ‘quality-adjusted life years’ measure for comparing the value of different health states. But questions remain about how these measures should be defined and used in an ethically defensible way, and how they should relate to each other. 

The symposium brought together international experts from philosophy and economics, as well as chief health economists from several national governments, to make progress on resolving these questions. It commenced with a widely attended afternoon of panel sessions at the National Museum of Australia that served to introduce the policy decision challenges to a broader audience, and the ways in which these challenges are currently approached in different jurisdictions across the world. They are pressing challenges; the distribution of public resources that impact on longevity and quality of life will likely come under increased scrutiny, as societies reckon with a range of new opportunities and threats, not least an increased risk of health pandemics. 

For additional information visit: https://www.valuelifehealth.com