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Health Updated October 2026

Comprehensive Health Economics and Economic Evaluation Training Programme

21 to 26 Nov 2026 | Online

Last updated: October 2026

Course Description

Purpose and rationale

Decisions about which medicines to list, which services to fund and which technologies to adopt are taken every week in Saudi health institutions, and they are taken under a hard constraint: the budget is finite, and every commitment forecloses an alternative. This programme exists because those decisions are improved by a shared analytical language, one that makes the trade-offs explicit rather than leaving them implicit in a committee discussion.

The programme delivers an intensive, integrated curriculum in health economics and economic evaluation, directed at the practical work of decision-making, formulary management and policy development. It is designed for practitioners rather than for economists: the ambition is not to produce researchers who build models for a living, but to produce clinicians, pharmacists and administrators who can read a submitted economic dossier, identify where its argument is weak, and defend a recommendation on the record.

Upon successful completion, participants are awarded the Certificate in Health Economics and Economic Evaluation.

Who should attend

  • Hospital and clinical pharmacists involved in formulary review or medicines management.
  • Physicians who sit on, or advise, Pharmacy and Therapeutics or formulary committees.
  • Health policy analysts, HTA staff and reimbursement reviewers.
  • Health service administrators and budget holders responsible for technology adoption decisions.
  • Academic staff and postgraduate students in pharmacy, medicine and public health who require a working foundation in economic evaluation.


What You'll Learn

Apply the core economic concepts of scarcity, opportunity cost, efficiency and equity to resource-allocation decisions in clinical and formulary settings.
Explain the distinctive features and failures of healthcare markets, and articulate the economic rationale for regulation, financing and public provision.
Specify the structural elements of an economic evaluation (perspective, comparator, time horizon, discounting) and justify each choice for a given decision problem.
Identify, measure and value healthcare costs and health outcomes, including the construction and interpretation of the Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY).
Distinguish among cost-minimisation, cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analysis, and calculate and interpret an Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Ratio (ICER) against a decision threshold.
Critically appraise a published economic evaluation using the CHEERS reporting standards and judge its validity and transferability to the local health system.
Construct and interpret simple decision-analytic models (decision trees, Markov models) and budget impact models, and characterise the uncertainty around their results.
Synthesise clinical, economic and value evidence into a defensible Health Technology Assessment or formulary recommendation, and communicate it clearly to non-technical decision makers.