Summer 2021 saw the release of the UK government’s Treasury Green Book (www.hcmmag.com/GreenBook) and its supplementary guidance on wellbeing.
The guidance gives an overview of wellbeing, including the theory and, science and also practical advice. It also introduces a new measure of economic value called the Wellby (www.hcmmag.com/Wellby), which was developed by social impact organisation, State of Life (www.stateoflife.org).
1: About the Wellby
The Wellby is short for “Wellbeing-adjusted Life Year.” The term was defined and refined by Paul Frijters and Christian Krekel in their Handbook for Wellbeing Policymaking in the UK, which was published in 2020. It’s defined as a change in life satisfaction of one point on a scale of 0 to 10, affecting one person for one year.
The Wellby endorses and supports the view that overall life satisfaction is the best survey question to measure personal wellbeing, almost always alongside associated drivers of life satisfaction such as employment, physical activity, volunteering, mental health, community wellbeing, education and skills development and socio economic status.
2: Impact, monitoring and evaluation
Assessing the impact of any initiative involves estimating the causal effect of programmes and interventions on wellbeing and life satisfaction – or how many Wellbys a project is responsible for generating during a specific timeframe.
Essentially this shows the difference between the average life satisfaction of those who are on a programme and those in a separate control group (who are not subject to the programme in question). It also examines the number of participants in the programme and the average duration of the wellbeing effects that are brought about by the interventions in question to examine the ultimate outcomes.
3: Value
Some other methods for calculating social value are protected by proprietary business models, whereas the developers of the Wellby say it offers a simple, open valuation method that can be used once the more involved job of establishing causal impact has been completed.
The Wellby is also pegged to the National Health Service’s QALY (Quality-Adjusted Life Year) standard, which is used by the NHS to judge the cost-effectiveness and value of health interventions such as drug efficacy.
This brings the Wellby into the mainstream medical sector and links it to measures of relevance, wellbeing and preventative health that are recognised by the NHS.
One Wellby is given a monetary value, with lower and upper bound limits, so the value is open for all to see and use. The lower and upper bounds are based on wellbeing valuation methods developed by State of Life.
