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INSTITUTE OF HEALTH ECONOMICS

1. BACKGROUND OF THE INSTITUTE

Since the early 1990s, the Health Sector of Bangladesh has been undertaking huge interventions so as to rapidly improve the health status of the population. Accordingly, in the fourth and fifth health sector programmes, the targeted coverage of the sector has been substantially expanded. The magnitude of health services to be devoted per person has been increased, and the measures have been proposed to drastically enhance the quality of services. Implementation of the plan requires huge amount of resources, but relative availability of resources has been declining. Given the growing scarcity of resources for the Sector, the only way to increase the coverage and improve the quality of services is to intensively utilize the existing facilities and allocate resources to the sectoral activities more efficiently. Increased allocative efficiency of resources requires, on the other hand, imparting regular training in health economics to the managers and professionals of the sector and others carrying out research on health economic issues.

The Government has increasingly felt the need for training of the personnel of the sector and conducting research in health economics, and started sending officials abroad to study health economics. It later became evident that the cost of overseas training of each person is so high that the government will not be able to train the required number of personnel using the small amount of fund received from the donors. In such a situation, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MOHFW) approached the University of Dhaka to establish an Institute to offer post-graduate degrees and conduct training programmes in Health Economics and carry out research on health economic issues. As a result, the Institute of Health Economics (IHE) was established in the University of Dhaka in July 1998 with the financial support of the Department for International Development (DFID) and the University of Dhaka.

2. MAJOR ACTIVITIES OF IHE

2.1.	Running postgraduate degree programmes: The Institute of Health Economics (IHE) offers a number of post-graduate degree programmes:

i) Undergraduate course in Health Economics. The institute provide four year Bachelor of Social Science in Health Economics. For Each year about 60 students are admitted to this Institute. The subject are taught in this course. Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Mathematical Economics, Statistics, Econometrics and some other management related courses. ii)	Masters in Health Economics

The Institute offers a one-year Masters degree in Health Economics. For each semester, there is a provision for enrolment of 46 students. The subjects offered in this programme include: Economic Theory (related to Health Sector), Public Health and Epidemiology, Health Policy and Planning, Applied Econometrics, Economics of Health Care, Economic Evaluation of Health Care, Health Services Management, Management Decision analysis, Hospital Management and Research Methodology.

iii)	M. Phil. in Health Economics

This is a two-year research degree, of which first year is for course work and second year for dissertation.

iv)	Ph. D. in Health Economics

This is a research degree by thesis on a topic relevant to health economics field.

2.2.	Conducting short training courses for the heath professionals: Every year, IHE offers two short courses (8 -10 week) on issues of Health Economics, Health Care Financing, Economic Evaluation of Health Care, Health Care Management, and Methodology of Health Economic Research are offered for the managers and officials of the Health and Population Sector. Each training course comprises 30 participants. The sessions of the short training courses normally take place in the evening hours.

Title of the training courses - Sponsored by Training Course on Health Economics - DFID Training Course on Health Economics - DFID Training Course on Health Economics - HEU, MOHFW Training Course on Costing and Economic Evaluation - DFID Operations Research on Reproductive Health - Population Council, USA Training Course on Health Economics - DFID Training Course on Health Economics - DFID

2.3.	Conducting research: In addition to teaching and training, research is an important activity of the Institute. It conducts research on issues related to Health Economics, Hospital Management, Health Care Management and Policy, Health Care Evaluation, Health Care Financing, and Public Health and Epidemiology which are in the priority areas of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Bangladesh. In addition to the externally funded studies, IHE also conducts studies on its own.

2.4.	Publications from IHE: Institute of Health Economics publishes research report, working paper, and monograph. The Institute has taken initiatives to publish a journal titled â€˜Bangladesh Health Economics Journalâ€™, which is under the process.

2.5.	Organizing Seminar/Workshop: IHE organizes seminars and workshops on the issues of health economics, public health and epidemiology, and health services management, and the faculty members regularly participate in the seminars/workshops outside the Institute (within the country and abroad).

2.6.	Organizing Conference: IHE organizes conference of the researchers and managers of the Health sector of Bangladesh on carefully chosen themes of Health Economics.

2.7.	Providing advisory services to the health sector: IHE is provides advisory services to the Health Sector, as and when requested.

2.8.	Faculty development and curriculum improvement exercises

The Institute of Health Economics conducts multidisciplinary programmes/research and the faculty members are from various disciplines. For the mutual improvement of the faculty members through enhancing their knowledge base on multidisciplinary issues, IHE carries out in-house seminars on economics, health economics, health services management, public health, and epidemiology issues. Each year IHE reviews the curriculum, and modifies and updates the curriculum, if necessary. IHE faculty members intensively devote approximately 60 hours over a period of two months to conduct these exercises. The main objective of these exercises is to develop Health economics as an integrated discipline, such that it emerges as a unified field combining several relevant fields, and enables the teachers and students to capture the entire discipline in the becoming comprehensively.

2.9.	Evaluation of courses by students

The students formally evaluate the courses, course teachers, curricula, teaching methods, office etc in every semester of the programmes, and the faculty members get the feedback and measures are adopted based on the outcomes of evaluation for improvement of teaching and programmes.

3. ADMISSION

3.1.	Admission requirements For the Undergraduate course, the students must have appeared in the B and D unit admission test in the university of Dhaka.

The applicant (national and international) to the Post- Graduate Diploma programme must be graduated from any reputed national or international university with medical or social science background. The successful PG Diploma holders and a few Honours/ Masters degree holders in Economics or the Business School having substantial courses in Economics are eligible to apply for the Masters programme. As both the Diploma and Masters programmes are full time and classes are carried out during daytime, service holders are required to take leave or at least take permission from the authority to enroll in these programmes. There is a provision for enrollment of five international students in each programme, if they fulfill the requirements for enrollment to the respective programme.

Enrolment to M. Phil. or Ph. D. programme is guided by the central regulations of the University of Dhaka.

3.2.	Process of admission

The seats are distributed among medical and non-medical students by 50%, and 30% seats are reserved for the female students. To enroll in the PostGraduate Diploma programme, students need to appear for both written examination (90 marks) and viva-voce (10 marks) examination. The written examination includes general knowledge, mathematics, and English.

To enroll in the Masters programme, students need to appear for written examination (95 marks) and viva-voce (5 marks) examination. The written examination includes general economics, mathematics, statistics, general knowledge/English language.

4. CONSTRAINTS

IHE is currently operating under a few severe constraints. First, it does not have any premise of its own, which is needed for its proper functioning. The University authority has been taking the measures for allotment of land and other necessary support for establishing a separate IHE premise. Second, since IHE is still in its growing stage it requires substantial support from the government and external donors, specially for providing grant for higher education and training of teachers and researchers. Unfortunately, donor support is not currently available. <