Welcome home to Dr Natasha Hall, who recently shared insights from her research into the societal costs of mental health ambulance callouts in Australia at the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) Real-World Evidence Summit 2025.

“The conference was an excellent experience,” Dr Hall says. “I found it fascinating to see researchers in other countries and in different health specialties apply methods and techniques to ensure that health economics have meaningful policy impacts.”

“I especially enjoyed the focus on using real-world evidence,” she adds. “It was lovely to meet health economics researchers from other fields of health.”

The conference brings together experts and industry leaders from health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) to share research and discuss solutions to the most pressing healthcare challenges in the Asia Pacific.

During the conference, Dr Hall presented two papers:

• Comparison and policy implications of ambulance duration and associated costs for suicidal presentations versus general presentations in Australia
• Out-of-pocket costs and affordability of Eating Disorder Medicare Benefits Schedule services using linked data.

She also attended a short course about techniques and methodologies to make observational studies more robust and aligned with the methods of a clinical trial.

“The short course provided me with information about various G-method techniques that can be used when standard regression is not appropriate,” she says.

G-methods are advanced techniques used to estimate cause-and-effect relationships from observational data, especially when traditional methods fall short.

“It will be interesting to continue learning these methods with the hope of using them in the future to draw stronger conclusions from messy, real-world data,” she says.

Dr Hall has been a key member of the National Addiction and Mental Health Surveillance Unit (NAMHSU) since 2023, working in data analysis using health economics, costing methods and data linkage.

Her work has been instrumental in Turning Point’s development of novel health economic projects.

While in Japan, she also attended the ISPOR Australian meeting and the ISPOR Japan meeting, where she spoke about her work at Turning Point and met leading experts in Health Economics from both countries.

“Thank you to all who have supported me at Turning Point, as well as the family of Frank Murphy for this opportunity,” Dr Hall said.

The family of Frank Murphy donated a bequest to Turning Point following his death. Their generous contribution means that Turning Point’s Travelling Scholarships can continue to support the development of the next generation of alcohol and other drug researchers each year.

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