Special Interest Group - Health Equity
This SIG focuses on developing evidence to monitor, understand and reduce unfair differences in health and healthcare.
Aim To promote the use of research evidence for equity informed policy decisions
Objectives
- To share knowledge of data and methods for assessing health disparities and conducting equity informative economic evaluations
- To connect researchers and facilitate collaboration in the economics of health equity
- To support early career researchers with an interest in this field to develop networks
- To share equity focused resources such as training courses, workshops and funding opportunities
- Sharing information electronically about papers, methods workshops, conferences.
- Hold a meeting at AHES 2022 to establish desired outcomes and activities of the group
- Regular Zoom meet ups, frequency TBA (including, work-in-progress presentations, methods sharing and small group networking)
- Engage with relevant health policy community consultation processes as a group (optional)
- Establish a database of health economists in researching in this field (optional)
- Organised session for IHEA (optional)
If you would like to join the SIG, please contact the conveners:
Anita Lal at anita.lal@deakin.edu.au
Dennis Petrie at dennis.petrie@monash.edu.au
Anagha Killedar at anagha.killedar@sydney.edu.au
Conveners
Deakin University
Dr Anita Lal is a Victorian Cancer Agency Early Career Research fellow at Deakin Health Economics, Deakin University. Her PhD, awarded in 2018, examined ways of incorporating equity into cost-effectiveness analysis for obesity prevention policies. Her current research focuses on health-related policies and programs to reduce inequities in healthcare utilisation and the distribution of cancers. Her fellowship, funded by the Victorian Government, is focused on the impacts and cost-effectiveness of targeted programs to increase bowel, breast and cervical cancer screening in under screened culturally and linguistically diverse groups in Victoria. She is a member of the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre Alliance Equity Advisory Group.
Monash University
Dennis Petrie is a Professor in the Centre for Health Economics, Monash University. He has published extensively on the economics of illicit drugs, smoking, alcohol, disability, cancer, the longitudinal measurement and evaluation of health inequalities and has led a large number of economic evaluations of healthcare interventions including alongside RCTs. He has consistently published in the leading health economics journals, with multiple papers in the Journal of Health Economics (4), Health Economics (6), Social Science & Medicine (5) and also high impact medical journals including JAMA, BMJ, PLOS Medicine, Addiction (2), Diabetologia, Diabetes Care (2), Clinical Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology (2). He specialises in analysing large and complex data sets to improve health policy decisions with a focus on reducing health inequities
Macquarie University
I’m a health economist at MUCHE (Macquarie University Centre for the Health Economy), based in Sydney, Australia. My research focuses on equity-informative economic evaluation—especially distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA), economic evaluation methodology, and advanced economic evaluation modelling. I have published 50+ peer-reviewed articles, including in journals such as JAMA Network Open, Genetics in Medicine, BMJ Global Health, Value in Health, PharmacoEconomics, and European Journal of Health Economics. One of my publications was selected as Value in Health Paper of the Year Award (2025). I am a Brocher Foundation (Geneva, Switzerland) Visiting Research Fellow and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Shanghai Health Development Research Center.