Lead Health Economist

Senior technical and professional leadership role heading health economics within the Strategic Value Unit, integrated with the Population Health Unit at NHS Central East ICB. The postholder leads complex economic evaluations and decision models that inform commissioning, resource allocation and service design. The post also carries line management of a health economics team and sits within a multidisciplinary decision intelligence function.

Fit depends on a Master's-level qualification in health economics or a closely related quantitative discipline and fluency in R or Python.

• Provide professional leadership for health economics across the integrated Strategic Value Unit and Population Health Unit, setting its direction
• Lead complex economic evaluations and decision models supporting commissioning, transformation and resource allocation
• Lead complex health economic programmes supporting strategic planning, commissioning, transformation and evaluation
• Apply cost-effectiveness, cost-utility, cost-benefit, budget impact, return on investment, multi-criteria and scenario modelling where they strengthen decisions
• Assess assumptions, uncertainty and sensitivity, keeping limitations transparent and conclusions proportionate
• Assess marginal benefits, opportunity costs, affordability and trade-offs between alternative uses of ICB resources
• Lead appraisal and synthesis of economic and related evidence, including literature, national guidance and routine health and care data
• Provide senior technical assurance of high-impact analyses and models through peer review and independent challenge
• Lead the health economic components of multidisciplinary evaluations of pathways, programmes and service changes
• Translate findings into clear recommendations and communicate costs, outcomes and uncertainty to technical and non-technical audiences
• Produce or assure economic content for business cases, option appraisals, committee papers and evaluation reports
• Line manage and professionally support the health economics team, including objectives, appraisal, performance, development and wellbeing

• Master's-level qualification in health economics, economics or a closely related quantitative discipline with substantial health economics content
• Continuing professional development in health economics, economic evaluation, decision modelling or related methods

• Applying health economics to prioritisation, resource allocation, option appraisal, pathway redesign, investment or disinvestment decisions
• Appraising economic evidence, developing model parameters and working with routine health, care, activity, outcome or cost data
• Leading, managing, supervising or developing health economists or analytical staff and setting technical standards
• Significant senior technical or professional leadership and leading complex multidisciplinary health economics or analytical programmes

• Fluency in economic evaluation and modelling using R or Python, including cost-effectiveness, budget impact and uncertainty analysis
• Structuring ambiguous decision problems, identifying comparators or counterfactuals and selecting proportionate economic methods
• Developing, interrogating and quality assuring complex economic models and drawing defensible conclusions from uncertain evidence
• Synthesising complex economic, clinical, financial and population evidence into clear recommendations

• Professional recognition or evidence of wider contribution to the health economics profession
• Real-world economic evaluation of services, programmes, pathways or system interventions
• Specialist methods such as preference elicitation, multi-criteria decision analysis or distributional economic evaluation
• NICE or health technology assessment methods and adapting national economic evidence to local decision-making

• Flexible working options, to be discussed
• Carer-friendly working environment
• Wellbeing support