Burden of disease: Costing an effective package of care for mental disorders

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The Global Burden of Disease project, a WHO-World Bank-Harvard collaboration, presented an unprecedented picture of global health across the developed and developing world, providing much-needed information for planning health services. Health was measured at the population level, and combined the number of life years lost due to death and disablement to give a total amount of life lost per disorder. One surprise of the project was the importance of mental disorders, accounting for 43% of life years lost due to disability in countries like Australia. Service planning to reduce this burden requires knowledge of cost-effective treatments.This project will trial a method used for combining burden and cost-effectiveness data to design an essential package of services to address the treatment shortfall in mental disorders. This research will assist in our understanding of why burden due to mental disorders persists, and the extent to which current treatment knowledge is able to address this burden within existing budgetary constraints. This will be achieved by: 1) detailing the costs and population outcome of current services in Australia for mental disorders, to determine which disorders are currently adequately treated and which disorders require further intervention, 2) calculating the costs and outcome of best practice interventions from clinical practice guidelines, to understand the extent to which current treatment knowledge can reduce burden due to mental disorders, 3) examining the equity consequences of such a package of ideal interventions, with the understanding that the treatment endpoint is not the same for all disorders. This is a secondary analysis, representing a method for translating existing cost and outcome data for individual treatments into their costs and consequences for health planning at the population level.