Patients’ time is a valuable resource that ought to be accounted for in economic evaluations conducted from a societal perspective. However, children and young people’s (CYP) time is rarely included in such economic evaluations, with research pointing to ambiguity and a lack of guidance around when it may be appropriate to do so as a primary reason.

Our Delphi study highlighted the following considerations as particularly important when judging whether CYP time should be included in an economic evaluation: (i) alignment with specified perspective, (ii) there is a substantial amount of forgone time, (iii) CYP time is not accounted for in other parts of the evaluation and (iv) CYP time costs are of particular interest to decision-makers.

Views gathered from panellists also highlighted that, in some cases, interpretation of relevant considerations requires value judgments.