Eye on Alumni: Irene Sanchez '11
Irene Sanchez (Economics) is a research fellow at the Centre for Health Economics in York (United Kingdom). She is a member of the team for Economic Evaluation and Health Technology Assessment. Among her projects are a study of health care funding allocation and an analysis of the well-being of informal caregivers.
Tell us a bit about the projects you're working on at the CHE.
I am currently working on three different projects all of them related with the field of health economics. The objective of the first project is to tackle socio-economic health inequalities by evaluating whether a health policy measure introduced by the British government in 2000s was successful in attaining the expected outcomes. This policy measure consisted of allocating additional health care funding to the five most deprived areas in England. Our aim is to perform a difference in difference estimation choosing some of the indicators (such as diabetes, hypertension, asthma) for which the government allocate additional funding, in order to know whether the General Practitioners indeed used this funding by increasing the number of prescriptions on the indicators under study before and after the initiative.
In the second project I am involved we are analyzing the well-being of informal caregivers by using the information in the British Household Panel Survey. In our study, the well-being information is related with the degree of happiness of the individual. We want to analyze whether the probability of being more or less happy for informal caregivers changes when different economic, labor, and health status for the informal caregiver are considered.
The third study I am working on is a literature review of patient charges by looking at the different economic agents that are involved and the consequences the literature has found for the production of health and health care.
After completing your masters degree, did you feel prepared to suceed in a research position like this one?
I am definitely very happy to have done the Master in Economics because it gave me all the quantitative skills CHE was looking for. In particular I am using a wide range of analytical and quantitative tools I studied in microeconometrics, health economics, and labor economics.
I would like to highlight the excellence of the Master in Economics at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. Given my experience, I can tell it fully prepares you to succeed in research positions, training students in strong qualitative and quantitative skills giving them the most up-to-date economic toolkit to be competitive in the job market.
What was the recruiting process like?
Part of the recruiting process included delivering a presentation about a research project of my own related to health economics. I presented my ideas on a project aiming at studying empirically the probability of an individual to become a permanent informal caregiver once she/he has entered into this role. The feeling of convincing the audience and later on receiving the offer was a remarkable success in my professional career.
As a Barcelona area native, how are you enjoying life in the northern UK?
Life in the north of UK has some peculiarities that make it difficult to compare to our way of life in Barcelona. For example, during winter the days are shorter, which makes people to go to work very early (around 8am) and come back home quite early too (around 4pm). About the weather well I think everybody knows about it! Still, York is a beautiful small city with an amazing Viking legacy and loads of cultural activities and stories to explore and discover.
I have already visited Barcelona twice since I left to begin my job at the CHE last October. It is always nice to come home and spend some time with my friends from the master that are now doing the GPEFM doctoral program at UPF. And of course, I don’t miss the chance to spend time with my family enjoying homemade food—and sunny days!
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