The National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) recently released guidelines for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of vaccination programs in Canada.
TGHRI Senior Scientist Dr. Beate Sander and the late Dr. Murray Krahn co-chaired the group that developed the first-in-Canada guidelines to help assess the cost-effectiveness of vaccination programs.
Many vaccination programs are available in Canada, from childhood vaccines to the annual flu shot. NACI provides recommendations to the Government of Canada on which vaccines to provide and identifies groups at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases who should be prioritized.
The cost-effectiveness of a vaccination program is an important factor in determining whether and how broadly the government should provide a vaccine; however, until now there was no established guidance on how to best determine cost-effectiveness.
Vaccines can benefit the unvaccinated as well as those who receive a vaccine. For example, when a large portion of the population is immune to a disease, it can reduce or halt the spread, protecting those who are not immune. This population-level protection—called herd immunity—means that vaccines require a different approach to economic evaluation than other health technologies.
A key part of the new guidelines released by NACI is how vaccination programs can affect society beyond the health care sector.
Developing best practices such as these allows decision-makers to be consistent in determining which vaccination programs to fund.
“We now have, for the first time, clearly articulated best practices for conducting and reporting economic evaluations of vaccination programs in Canada,” explains Dr. Sander. “We developed the guidelines to include an evaluation from the publicly funded health system perspective and one from the societal perspective. This accounts for the full range of impacts and spill-over effects, including in those who are not directly vaccinated.”
Vaccines help protect us from a wide variety of diseases. The government decides which vaccines will be available to which groups of people based on advice from the National Advisory Committee on Immunization.
Dr. Sander is a Professor in the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto and holds the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Economics of Infectious Diseases.
National Advisory Committee on Immunization. Guidelines for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of vaccination programs in Canada. Public Health Agency of Canada, April 2023. ISBN : 978-0-660-45930-1