Feasibility of a Health Utilities Approach for Quantifying Noneconomic Losses from Personal Injury

There is wide agreement that existing approaches to valuing noneconomic losses from personal injury lack coherence. We and others have previously noted the considerable potential for “health utility” measurement — an approach developed in health economics for valuing health outcomes in public health and medicine — to bring greater rationality to assessments of injury-related noneconomic loss. However, the feasibility of creating utility measures that are suitable for use in personal injury compensation has not been demonstrated. This study takes that step. We surveyed 4,129 members of the general public to assess people's preferences for a variety of non-fatal “health states”. The health states were selected to reflect harms commonly seen in claims to transport accident and workers compensation schemes. We then followed established statistical methods for transforming the survey responses into a “severity weight” for each health state. We show how the severity weights can be used to define tiers in a schedule for guiding noneconomic damages determinations. We discuss the strengths and limitations of the approach, and consider implementation challenges