Recent work by NICE in the UK suggested that for complex interventions or strategies, an individual economic metric—such as the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (which shows how much extra cost decision-makers selleck compound have to bear in order to gain one additional quality-adjusted life year)—is insufficient for decision-makers to make an investment.7 The study found that there are a number of other economic metrics that are deemed important in policy decisions. Moreover, the study found that lots of different tools were being used to support purchasing decisions—most of which required

judgements on the part of users. This was further corroborated by another study in which the authors consulted with potential stakeholders prior to developing their economic model.13 This strongly indicates the importance of engaging stakeholders in the evidence generation process in order to ensure the wider use of such evidence and to facilitate its transferability to other countries. In this paper, we describe EQUIPT (European study on quantifying utility of investment in protection from tobacco), a comparative effectiveness research (CER) study evaluating

the cross-context transferability of economic evidence on tobacco control. Methods and analysis Objective The overarching aim of EQUIPT is to provide healthcare policymakers in the EU with bespoke information about the potential economic and wider returns to be expected from investing in evidence-based tobacco control agendas. EQUIPT has the ultimate ambition of underpinning health authority decisions on the development and/or harmonisation of new strategies for tobacco control projects for health promotion and disease prevention in the EU by disseminating the ROI concept and tools across Europe. In the first instance, it will test the applicability and implementation of the already

developed ROI tool in four Batimastat other EU member states. Next, it will test the transferability of the ROI methods to guide comprehensive tobacco-control policies in other EU countries. Study design EQUIPT is a multicentre, interdisciplinary CER study in public health. The NICE Tobacco ROI tool—which is a practical, customisable economic model developed in England to help make real-world decisions in the context of local government decision-making—will be adapted to meet the needs of European decision-makers. Locating itself in the theory of diffusion of innovation14 and transferability of economic evidence,10 EQUIPT will co-create ROI tools to compare the effectiveness of tobacco control strategies both within and across several EU countries.