Cam Donaldson

Cameron Richard Donaldson (born 30 November 1960) is a health economist.[1] He holds the Yunus Chair in Social Business & Health and is Pro Vice Chancellor (Research) at Glasgow Caledonian University, the University for the Common Good.

Cam Donaldson
Cam Donaldson (with Nobel Laureate, Dr Muhammad Yunus) in Dhaka, July 2017
Born (1960-11-30) 30 November 1960
Glasgow, Scotland
NationalityBritish/Canadian

He is renowned for his research on measuring and valuing the benefits of health care, using economics in health care priority setting and economic evaluation. He has published over 250 refereed journal articles and seven books[2] and, in almost 35 years in health economics research, Cam has won over £25m in competitive funding awards, over £10m of this as principal investigator.

Early life and education

Donaldson was born in Glasgow.[3] His father was a trade union activist, working as a stereotyper at the Scottish Daily Express. His mother was a comptometer operator. He has two sisters and a brother.

In the early 1970s, Express Newspapers moved his father's job to Manchester. Not having supported a football team in Scotland, and due to the famous Scottish footballer, Denis Law, finishing his career there, Donaldson picked Manchester City, and has remained a lifelong fan of the club. Having been educated at Bishopbriggs High School and Cheadle Moseley School for Boys, Donaldson went to study Economics at the University of Nottingham (1979–1982), immediately followed by a master's degree in Health Economics at the University of York. The interest in health came from wanting to apply economics to the public sector, and health, at the time, was a new and interesting area of exploration.

Career

Donaldson worked as a research fellow during the first year of the Centre for Health Economics (CHE) at the University of York. Here he met two of the three main collegial influences on his career – Stephen Birch (now at McMaster University) and the late Alan Maynard (the first director of CHE).

From York, Donaldson jumped into multidisciplinary environments in the (then) Health Care Research Unit at Newcastle University (1984–1988) and the Department of Public Health at the University of Sydney (his first Lectureship; 1989–1990). He then returned to Scotland to spend most of the 1990s as deputy director of the Health Economics Research Unit at the University of Aberdeen (1991–98). Initially, he deputised to part-time Director, Professor Gavin Mooney, one of the 'founding fathers' of health economics,[4] who persuaded Donaldson to undertake a PhD under his supervision. He became a professor at Aberdeen in 1996 and, for five years of his tenure at Aberdeen, served as national organiser of the Health Economists' Study Group (HESG), the UK body for health economics researchers.[5]

From 1998 to 2002, Donaldson worked as the Svare Chair in Health Economics at the University of Calgary. Here, he built a group of health economics researchers, holding an appointment there until 2011, visiting frequently. Whilst in Calgary he established the Health Economics Methods Group of the Cochrane Collaboration with Luke Vale (of the University of Aberdeen, now at Newcastle) and Miranda Mugford (University of East Anglia) and acted as co-convenor from 1998 to 2008.

In 2001, the Health Foundation (a major charitable funder in the UK) announced a national competition for a chair in Health Economics. Any university applying had to team up with a named candidate. Donaldson's colleagues (particularly Professors John and Senga Bond) at Newcastle invited him to be their candidate, and together they won the funding of £3m. What made Donaldson equally proud, however, was that three of the candidates who made it through to the final five were PhD students of Mooney.

At Newcastle, as well as building another significant group of health economists, Donaldson became the inaugural director of the Institute of Health and Society (from 2006 to 2010). There he worked closely with Professor Michael Jones-Lee and Rachel Baker, now Professor of Health Economics and director of the Yunus Centre for Social Business & Health at Glasgow Caledonian University, in translating Jones-Lee's work on valuing human life and safety into the health arena, leading major projects for the Department of Health in England and the European Commission.

In 2010 he took up the Yunus Chair at Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) where he established the Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health. He was intrigued by the mission (for the 'Common Weal') of this post-1992 university, and increasingly concerned that, despite world class research at top universities and world class health care provision in the National Health Service, health inequalities were not only persisting, but growing. The idea of thinking about how non-health focused initiatives, such as social enterprise and fair credit, operating in the most-deprived communities, could improve health through enhanced social cohesion, and working with Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus on such issues, drew him back to Scotland. GCU's Yunus Centre has attracted international attention and substantial research funding since its inception, most notably from the UK's Research Councils, the Wellcome Trust and the National Institute for Health Research.

Contributions

Using 'willingness to pay' to value the benefits of health care

Donaldson has pioneered this method in health, having developed novel approaches to quantifying values of patients and the public with respect to treatment options, demonstrating that: WTP can ‘detect’ values of attributes of care beyond health gain (i.e. ‘process utility’),[6] and; distributional concerns (i.e. that WTP is associated with ability to pay[7]) can be accommodated in applying the results of WTP studies to publicly funded health care settings. Cam also produced (with Jan Abel Olsen) the first-ever attempt to use WTP to establish relative priorities across health programmes,[8] and has led major projects exploring the relationship between WTP and quality adjusted life years (QALYs).[9][10][11]

Using economics in healthcare priority setting

Donaldson has led the development and use of an economic framework, known as programme budgeting and marginal analysis (PBMA), in local (geographically defined) health care settings where funders are charged with meeting the needs of local populations from limited funding envelopes. This has involved working directly with decision makers in several contexts at various levels of health care systems in the UK, Canada and New Zealand, working largely with Craig Mitton at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, using mainly qualitative research networks to document experiences. The main objective has been to adapt economics to complex management processes, so enhancing its uptake in decision-making and the framework has been used in several hundred health organisations globally.[12] Related to this work, Donaldson acted as Honorary Secretary to the International Society on Priorities in Healthcare[13] from 2006 to 2011, hosting the records and accounts of the society at Newcastle University.

Development and application of economic evaluation

Donaldson has acted as co-investigator on several economic evaluation projects over his career, and has made important contributions to methods development in this area. Each has involved collaboration with health care researchers and professionals in several clinical settings. These evaluations have all created new knowledge in their respective clinical fields and have had various degrees of impact (e.g. feeding into NICE technology assessments), notably in nephrology, care of frail older people, osteoporosis screening, general surgery, sexual health and stroke. He's been a member of the National Institute for Health Care Excellence Appraisal Committee and chaired the Family Planning Association's Expert Panel on the Economics of Sexual Health in England, which reported in August 2005. With respect to methods of economic evaluation, he has co-produced two important papers in health economics criticising the foundations of QALYs and demonstrating that, as with WTP, QALYs are influenced by socio-economic status.[14][15]

Creating the first Centre for Social Business and Health

Donaldson has been able to build a multidisciplinary team, combining expertise in health economics, finance, anthropology, sociology, social policy, political economy, history, public health and statistics. In 2013 Donaldson managed to secure a major programme grant worth £2 million over five years from the UK's Medical and Economic and Social Research Councils entitled 'Evidencing Social Enterprise as a Public Health Intervention'.[16] The project commenced in January 2014. Other projects have followed, funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government's Health Directorate.

Awards

Donaldson has won several competitive personal awards for his research, such as:

Personal life

Donaldson lives in Glasgow with his wife and partner (since 1992), Diane, who is a successful university administrator. They have two children (Graham and Callum Imray) and a grandson (Dominic).

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References
  1. "Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health". Glasgow Caledonian University. Retrieved 9 April 2014.
  2. "Credit Crunch Health Care: how economics can save our publicly-funded health services". Policy Press. Archived from the original on 14 July 2014. Retrieved 9 April 2014.
  3. "Glasgow Caledonian appoints top health economist to new Yunus Chair". Glasgow Caledonian University. Archived from the original on 14 July 2014. Retrieved 11 June 2014.
  4. "Gavin Mooney Obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 April 2014.
  5. Croxson, Bronwyn (1998). "From Private Club to Professional Network: An Economic History of the Health Economists' Study Group, 1972–1997". Health Economics. 7 (Supplement 1): S9–S45.
  6. Donaldson, C; Shackley, P (1997). "Does "process utility" exist? A case study of willingness to pay for laparoscopic cholecystectomy". Social Science and Medicine. 44: 699–707.
  7. Donaldson, C (1999). "Valuing the benefits of publicly provided health care: Does 'ability to pay' preclude the use of 'willingness to pay'?". Social Science and Medicine. 49: 551–563.
  8. Olsen, J-A; Donaldson, C (1998). "Helicopters, hearts and hips: Using willingness to pay to set priorities for public sector health care programmes". Social Science and Medicine. 46: 1–12.
  9. Jones, Andrew M. Elgar Handbook of Health Economics. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2012, p. 430.
  10. Robinson; et al. (2013). "Estimating a WTP-based value of a QALY: the 'chained' approach". Social Science and Medicine. 92: 92–104.
  11. "EuroVaQ – European Value of a Quality Adjusted Life Year". Newcastle University. Archived from the original on 14 July 2014. Retrieved 9 April 2014.
  12. Mitton; et al. (2003). "Priority setting in health authorities: a novel approach to a historical activity". Social Science and Medicine. 57: 1653–1663.
  13. "International Society on Priorities in Health Care". International Society on Priorities in Health Care. Retrieved 11 June 2014.
  14. Birch and Donaldson (2003). "Valuing the benefits of health care: where's the extra in extra welfarism?". Social Science and Medicine. 56: 1121–1133.
  15. Donaldson; et al. (2002). "The pervasiveness of the 'distribution problem' in economic evaluation in health care". Journal of Health Economics. 11: 55–70.
  16. "£2m study will exmaine impact of social enterprise on health in Scotland". Glasgow Caledonian University. Archived from the original on 14 July 2014. Retrieved 9 April 2014.
  17. "Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research (AHFMR)". Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research (AHFMR). Retrieved 11 June 2014.
  18. "Canadian Institutes of Health Research". Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Retrieved 11 June 2014.
  19. "Foundation Chair receives national honour". Health Foundation. Retrieved 11 June 2014.
  20. "Professor Cam Donaldson". AIM Research. Retrieved 11 June 2014.
  21. "Foundation Chair receives national honour". Health Foundation. Retrieved 11 June 2014.
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