Neil McHugh
Professor of Public Health Economics
Yunus Centre
Neil McHugh is Professor of Public Health Economics within the Economics of Health and Wellbeing Research Group in the Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health.
Neil is a mixed-method, interdisciplinary, social scientist working at the interface of public health, health economics and social policy. He works on two main areas of research. The first is eliciting public values concerning resource allocation decisions to improve health and reduce health inequalities. The second is conceptualising and evidencing the role of social finance – microcredit and impact bonds – on health. He has experience and expertise using stated preference techniques (for example, Contingent Valuation, Person Trade-Off), Q methodology, Q-based survey methods and qualitative methods.
His work has been funded by National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NIHR), the Wellcome Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Charity, among others. He is a member of the Wellcome Trust’s Social Sciences Discovery Advisory Group which shortlists candidates for Wellcome Career Development Awards and Wellcome Discovery Awards.
His co-written book, Social Finance and Health, was published by Routledge in 2023. He has published in journals including, including Social Science and Medicine, Health Economics, International Journal of Equity in Health, Health Expectations, Geoforum, Evidence and Policy, BMC Health Services Research, Evaluation, Stanford Social Innovation Review and BMC Medical Ethics.
He is the Social Finance module leader on the MSc Social Innovation and co-delivers the annual Q Methodology Workshop. He is an External associate member of Centre on Household Assets and Savings Management (CHASM), University of Birmingham.
He is particularly interested in supervising PhD students around preference elicitation related to health resource allocation decisions and social finance (such as microfinance, impact bonds, community finance).