Prioritizing Suicide Prevention through the Lens of the Individual's Well-Being

• Background: The need for priority setting in healthcare became evident during the Covid-19 pandemic, when planned care was postponed facilitating emergency treatment of Covid-19 patients, raisinquestions about the population’s preferences.Aim: To estimate the population values interventions reducing the number of suicides in comparison to treatments reducing the number of deaths due to other causes in a country where healthcare system has a pronounced public character and a declared emphasis on equity and solidarity during a time when the limited healthcare resources were predominantly allocated for the treatment of Covid patients.Data and Methods: The data was collected via a web survey sent to members of the web panel Userneeds during a tree-week period starting with the last week of December 2021, when media was informing the population about global experts and politicians’ huge concern about the extremely high infection risk of the Omicron. The survey was designed to identify the populations’ preferences for the allocation of the limited health care resources to save lives. An online discrete choice experiment was conducted among a sample of 1000 respondents to elicit the relative importance placed on reducing the number of deaths due to suicide in comparison to deaths due to pancreatic cancer, breast cancer and acute heart attack. The sample is representative with respect age, gender, and geographical region for the adult population of Sweden.Results: Respondents with high value of life satisfaction and no experience of any of the four health conditions chose to allocate a given limited healthcare budget for relatively young people but not to suicide. When not controlling for the individual’s life satisfaction, the respondents seem to prioritize the interventions that reduce the risk of young people to die due to suicide and breast cancer.Discussion: Even though the derived value of suicide prevention is near the average willingness to pay for suicide prevention, in general, a value derived using Wellbeing Valuation should not be seen as the actual amount that people would be willing to pay.

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MEDICIN OCH HÄLSOVETENSKAP  -- Klinisk medicin -- Psykiatri (hsv//swe)

MEDICAL AND HEALTH SCIENCES  -- Clinical Medicine -- Psychiatry (hsv//eng)

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