OBJECTIVES:

Economic evaluation aims to compare costs and consequences of alternative programmes. The conventional approaches tend to capture health related outcomes, and are not well suited to evaluate public health programmes with multiple outcomes across various sectors. While there is a growing body of research that seeks to address such existing methodological challenges, an overview of these developments is still lacking.This scoping review aims to map methodological literature, appraise the quality of applied case-studies and identify priorities for further research of economic evaluation of multi-sectoral public health programmes.

METHODS:

We systematically searched for relevant English literature across five electronic databases: PubMed, PROQUEST Central, EBSCOhost, SCOPUS and the National Health Service-Economic Evaluation Database (NHS-EED), from their date of inception to 24 May 2022. We included applied case-studies, methodological- and theoretical papers that applied a multi-sectoral approach to economic evaluation for public health programmes. We presented a narrative summary of the existing conceptual or methodological approaches, as well as a qualitative appraisal of the methodological quality of included case-studies based on a standardized checklist. We further conducted thematic coding to identify dominant themes for further research.

RESULTS:

Eight methodological approaches, ten applied case-studies and thirteen priority-or agenda setting records were included. Approaches that aggregate outcomes in monetary units (e.g., cross-sectoral cost–benefit analysis) emerged as the most frequently applied. Our review identified significant variations in methodological quality, which undermines conclusions on the cost effectiveness of multi-sectoral public health programmes.

CONCLUSIONS:

This scoping review provides a far-reaching, yet narrative overview of methodological research. Further research should prioritize development of instruments that enable valuation and aggregation of cross-sectoral outcomes using a more comprehensive economic evaluation framework that can address the existing methodological uncertainty related to economic evaluation of multi-sectoral public health programmes.