Using register data to shape child and mental health policy: A visit by associate professor Claire de Oliveira, senior health economist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Canada.

Research group CHAP - Child Health and Parenting, Department of Public Health and Caring Sciences, Uppsala University, invites associate professor Claire de Oliveira, senior scientist/senior health economist at the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Canada.Dr. de Oliveira has published extensively in the mental health economics and mental health services research fields, with over 130 publications in international peer-review journals (h index=22), and over 100 invited presentations in different countries.

She has extensive experience working with administrative health care and survey data and has expertise in data analysis and economic analyses.A health economics perspective is taken in many of the projects ongoing at CHAP, because of the importance of informed decision-making when allocating healthcare resources.

During her four weeks visit, Dr. de Oliveira will supervise one PhD student and provide expertise on current work of our research assistants and upcoming doctoral students.

We plan two seminars: 1) Methods to address causality in longitudinal observational data, and 2) Health econometric approaches to address skewed data, and two lectures on: 1) Estimating the economic burden in mental health, and 2) Use of microsimulation models in mental health.

Researchers and students from departments at Uppsala University, as well as collaborators from Umeå University and Karolinska Institute will be invited to the seminars and lectures.

We will discuss the possibility of exchange of doctoral students to build new and exchange existing competencies.A visit by Associate professor de Oliveira can be a unique opportunity for our PhD student, research assistants and researchers to benefit from her expertise in using register/administrative databases to assess costs and outcomes in child health and mental health.

It would be a major step towards expanding our network and establishing an important collaboration.