The relative value of suicide prevention in health care priority setting

This article investigates how the Swedish population values a reduction in the number of suicides in relation to other life-saving interventions within the health care sector. An online discrete choice experiment was conducted with a sample of 1000 Swedish members of the web panel Userneeds to elicit the relative importance placed on reducing the number of suicides in comparison to deaths due to pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, and acute heart attack. The choice set consisted of three attributes: number of lives saved, cause of death, and age group affected. We found that respondents valued saving lives by suicide prevention lower than saving lives from pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, or acute heart attack.