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Economic evaluations

Every pound spent on one thing is a pound not spent on another. Gwyn’s economic evaluations put that choice into numbers. He compared hip prostheses not on their price but on what they cost over twenty years once revisions were counted, and found little to beat the cheapest, long-established one. He costed on-the-spot blood testing in an A&E department against sending samples to the laboratory. With Sian Hollinghurst and colleagues in the South and West he built a DALYs project, a tool for planning care by the burden of disease it could avoid. And with Thomas Elston he asked why new policies are so often judged on one shot rather than against what the money would otherwise have done.