Journal article
Lessons from the pandemic on the value of research infrastructure
- Abstract:
- The COVID-19 pandemic has shed a spotlight on the resilience of healthcare systems, and their ability to cope efficiently and effectively with unexpected crises. If we are to learn one economic lesson from the pandemic, arguably it is the perils of an overfocus on short-term allocative efficiency at the price of lack of capacity to deal with uncertain future challenges. In normal times, building spare capacity with ‘option value’ into health systems may seem inefficient, the costs potentially exceeding the benefits. Yet the fatal weakness of not doing so is that this can leave health systems highly constrained when dealing with unexpected, but ultimately inevitable, shocks—such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we argue that the pandemic has highlighted the potentially enormous option value of biomedical research infrastructure. We illustrate this with reference to COVID-19 response work supported by the United Kingdom National Institute for Health Research Oxford Biomedical Research Centre. As the world deals with the fallout from the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, pressure will soon come to review government expenditure, including research funding. Developing a framework to fully account for option value, and understanding the public appetite to pay for it, should allow us to be better prepared for the next emerging problem.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, 719.4KB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1186/s12961-021-00704-2
Authors
- Publisher:
- BioMed Central
- Journal:
- Health Research Policy and Systems More from this journal
- Volume:
- 19
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 54
- Publication date:
- 2021-04-01
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-03-15
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1478-4505
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1170060
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1170060
- Deposit date:
-
2021-04-01
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- LSJ Roope et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativeco mmons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record