From Scooby-Doo to allocating resources in the NHS – our Pint of Science night had it all

On 10 May, researchers from NIHR ARC West and Health Economics Bristol talked about how much good health costs as part of Pint of Science, a festival that aims to bring researchers into pubs to talk about their work. Dr Carlos Sillero Rejon was one of those researchers. Here he reflects on the evening.

Did you know that, according to the Department of Health and Social Care, Scooby-Doo is the healthiest cartoon? Well, this is something that we learnt at our Pint of Science evening on 10 May, alongside many other things.

Pint of Science is one of the most popular science festivals, if not the most popular one. The idea is simple: to bring people and researchers into local pubs to talk about science. It usually takes place every year in early May all around the world. This year, the first year it was taking place physically after a couple of years online, the Greenbank pub opened its doors so a bunch of people and us researchers could gather together to talk about how to make the most of our resources to improve everyone’s health.

We weren’t sure how an evening about health economics would go down with the public, but we were pleased that our event was sold out.

Professor Will Hollingworth and I (Carlos Sillero) started introducing “how much does good health cost?”. We were very fortunate to have Will’s expertise to introduce us to the current context of healthcare: NHS spending, ongoing pressure, and the huge disparities in healthcare spending. We learned that in this context priority setting is inevitable. Besides throwing chocolate prizes to the audience when they guessed (or knew, sorry!) an answer to one of my quizzes, I tried to explain how health economics aims to provide rigorous scientific information to help to make these complicated decisions.

After a nice break where we were able to talk more informally with the people who came to this event, our rising stars Isabella Floredin and Josie Morley introduced their PhD projects.

Isabella talked about how quality of life should be measured and questioned whether it is all about being healthy. She illustrated this with her project looking at what quality of life means to young people living with disabilities.

Josie talked about the tricky issue of stopping some NHS procedures in order to make better use of limited resources. She introduced us to her PhD project trying to understand patients’ and healthcare professionals’ points of view regarding stopping a specific NHS intervention. She was great at using peanuts, crisps and pints as metaphors to help us understand the difficulties of changing NHS habits.

We hope that the amazing people that shared that time with us learned something new. We also learned loads. We learned that people want to hear about these topics, even if they are sensitive and complex. We also learned that we should not underestimate the public. Even though our topics seemed complicated, the questions from the public were amazing, more interesting than in many conferences I’ve been to.

The evening obviously stirred debate. We even heard a couple discussing how to allocate resources in the NHS on the way home from the pub.

Finally, the evening reminded us that science can be fun and interesting, and should always be accessible to the public.