Making the most of a long summer: My NIHR internship in Health Economics at Oxford
13 November 2025
For PPE students, a summer spent in a healthcare research department may not seem the usual path, but for Leyi Pan an NIHR Health Economics internship at in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences was the perfect fit. In this reflective blog, Leyi shares insights from her eye-opening experience, exploring the rigour, real-world impact, and ethical depth of research that shapes health policy and wellbeing.
By: Leyi Pan
Third-Year Undergraduate Student in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), Pembroke College, University of Oxford
What to do in a long summer? While investment banking and consulting internships sound like the standard route for a PPE student, I had a mind-opening experience doing a health economics internship at Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences (NDPCHS) in Oxford.
The first thing that strikes me was how health economics is so different from economics. Firstly, my work gets credited. No more nameless research inputs and no more dirty work – Our supervisors helped us understand everything we do and how it contributes to the larger picture. Secondly, there is a sense of practical relevance. Here, research feeds directly into policy making, impacting the population’s health and happiness. Lastly, probably because of the high stakes at hand, there is a stress on research standards and data quality that I have not felt in my other research experiences. Through engaging in systematic reviews and evaluations, I learnt to be critical, evaluative, and introspective.
I was also fascinated by the multi-facets of decision making in health economics and their ethical underpinnings. We had seminars on NICE’s decision making process, and through studying the consultations on new medicines such as Lecanemab, I started to understand how multiple interest groups could be incorporated. I am also intrigued by the ethical underpinnings of decisions made with the help of health economics – It is always about allocating scarce resources, but when it concerns the fundamental need of humans to live a quality life, by what principles they get allocated becomes tricky. Concerns about socio-economic impacts also penetrate the entire research process, from what data to use to what costs to model in, health economics empowers the incorporation of inequality concerns into economic evaluation.
Aside from academic growth, the internship experience was more than great. NDPCHS has an inter-disciplinary mix of researchers who provided us immense support throughout the internship. As a non-medic, I learnt so many new things that I would never have touched upon through practical projects, with help from my supervisors, co-interns who are from different disciplines, as well as others in the department who are generous enough to offer many well-curated talks and seminars for us to learn about a myriad of research topics.
I genuinely encourage people from seemingly irrelevant backgrounds who want to learn more about health economics to apply to this internship – You will learn so much and have such a great time!