Arriving April 19, 2018, International scholar Dr. Rachel Baker to spend 3 months at C2E2

Rachel Baker is Professor of Health Economics and Director of the Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health at Glasgow Caledonian University.  Before moving to Glasgow in 2010, she worked at the University of Newcastle where she completed her PhD funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and her Postdoctoral Fellowship funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Rachel’s research interests focus on societal values with respect to health care resource allocation especially in relation to questions of methodology and understanding choice and societal value.  She was involved in the UK Social Value of a QALY and European Value of a QALY projects and has expertise in Q methodology and qualitative methods as well as health economic approaches to valuation and preference elicitation.  With funding from the MRC Methodology Panel, from 2011-2014, Rachel led research to explore societal perspectives on the relative value of life-extending treatments for people with terminal illnesses.  She is Past President of the International Q methodology Society and sits on the Wellcome Trust Expert Review Group for Ethics and Society (early career awards).

More recently Rachel has contributed to a body of research investigating the health and wellbeing impacts of microfinance and social enterprise, viewed as a public health intervention.  That work, through the MRC/ESRC funded CommonHealth research programme (http://www.commonhealth.uk) and the Chief Scientist Office, Scottish Government funded ‘Finwell’ project is just beginning to publish findings.