Long-term economic outcomes for interventions in early childhood: protocol for a systematic review.

INTRODUCTION: Investment in early childhood produces positive returns: for the child, the family and the community. Benefits have been shown to be significant within certain parameters, but a systematic review of the economic evidence across multiple sectors including health, education and social welfare will have the capacity to inform policy relative to the full range of social determinants. This review will take a broad approach, encompassing a range of costs and benefits to enable the identification of the most beneficial investments in early childhood and to highlight gaps in current research. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: Economic evaluations incorporating both costs and long-term outcomes of early childhood interventions and programmes will be included. Outcomes may be valued in monetary units or quantified non-monetary units (eg, quality-adjusted life years (QALY), disability-adjusted life years (DALY)). Results will be expressed as a ratio according to the outcome; with monetary outcomes expressed as cost-benefit ratios or return on investment, and non-monetary outcomes expressed as cost per QALY or DALY. The target population is children aged 0-5 years.Extensive database searches across sectors will be undertaken. The review will involve five phases: defining the research question, identifying relevant studies, selecting studies, extracting and collating data, and summarising and reporting results. The search commenced in 2019 and the expected end date is December 2020. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The findings of this review will inform policymakers and practitioners in public health, education, social welfare and primary care settings. The publication plan includes a series of academic publications, and policy papers prepared and disseminated through Telethon Kids Institute networks. Exemption from ethics approval was granted by the University of Western Australia Human Ethics Office (RA/4/20/5677). PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER: CRD42020145901.

A Modelling Framework for Householder Decision-Making for Wildfire Emergencies.

The occurrence of wildfire threats has increased in the last few decades creating serious challenges for thousands of communities around the world. Understanding the physical and social dynamics imposed by wildfires is fundamental to assessing and reducing the ensuing risk to different communities. Although, several studies investigating household wildfire risk perception and decision-making are available in the literature, modelling solutions to predict household behaviour in wildfire scenarios are still in their early stages. Hence the lack of a behavioural model suitable for embedding within a simulation tool. In this paper, we propose a mathematical framework aimed at simulating how householders perceive the risk associated to wildfires and how they take protective actions in response to such threats. A conceptual Wildfire Decision Model, based on nine assumptions derived from existing literature on human behaviour in wildfires, is introduced. A mathematical framework is then proposed to implement such a model within a simulation tool. The proposed modelling solution can help identify the information required to generate new dynamic and behavioural travel demand models for wildfire evacuation.