New micro costing paper published in Implementation Science

18 Feb 2021

The paper outlines how we retrospectively costed the development of the IDEAs intervention, a multifaceted intervention in primary care to improve attendance at diabetic retinopathy screening. 

Most studies that consider the cost of implementation start from the point of a fully designed or selected implementation intervention; few studies report the costs of developing the intervention. Our retrospective micro costing of the IDEAs intervention to support the implementation of diabetic retinopathy screening addresses this gap. We demonstrate how this implementation stage can be costed and offer insight for other researchers when assigning resources to each of the development steps within their own budgets. Our findings highlight the significant opportunity cost associated with the time devoted to development, indicating development costs should be considered as part of the assessment of cost-effective interventions. You can read the full paper here.