HESG Summer 2012 - 40th Anniversary

The Health Economists’ Study Group, popularly known as HESG, exists to support and promote the work of health economists. It was founded in 1972 and is therefore the oldest organisation of its type in health economics and remains one of the largest. It is based in the UK, but this does not restrict its membership and interests. Of its 450 members, around 10% are outside the UK.

Meetings are held twice a year at universities around the UK. In the summer of 2012 HERC was privileged to hold the meeting in Oxford and simultaneously to host HESG’s 40^th anniversary celebration with a panel discussion on the state of the discipline of health economics and a dinner at Balliol College. The meeting was one of the largest held in the history of the organization.

HESG has been an important part of the development of health economics in the UK and elsewhere. It was the initiative of a group of economists at York University and was organised from there by Tony Culyer for the first 13 years of its life. Although the group has an academic function – the creation and transmission of knowledge and ideas – its members work in commercial, academic and government settings and its concerns are applied and policy orientated as well as theoretical. It is currently organised by Steve Morris of UCL and Matt Sutton of Manchester University.