IMPRESSIONS
Senegalese delegation with Dr. Yot Teerawattananon, Dr. Wanrudee Isaranuwatchai and Aparna Ananthakrishnan from HITAP
We are very honored to have participated in the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) training and symposium.
We have seen interesting presentations ranging from economic valuation methods to the introduction of HTA in countries like Japan, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines and Singapore.
Through the shared modules, we realize that economic evaluation in health is of capital importance since it allows us to clarify choices about new interventions and best contributes to the rationality of decisions for health policy. We realize that there are similarities in terms of socio-cultural determinants with our country, Senegal, which must be taken into consideration when introducing HTA. We also understood that setting up an HTA committee requires strong political will from the experiences of the different countries presented at the symposium.
However, there was a lot of information that was delivered over the course of the training and symposium activity. We are aware that this is an introduction to HTA and that it may take time for assimilate all the concepts. It would be interesting to lighten the modules a little, in order to allow participants to better situate themselves and to be able to feed into the exchanges.
We thank our partners, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) as well as United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and our country authorities for allowing us to participate in this very important training. We intend to continue the adventure of possible participation in other workshops and seminars, especially certified trainings on the subject, in order to educate our decision makers on the use of HTA to support decision-making at the national level.
