Study strengths and weaknesses
weakness, n>600
Contrasting with many studies in this area (see Comparison with other studies section), a key strength of this economic evaluation is that it drew on data from a large (n>600) RCT that followed up participants for up to 12 months. Additionally, to our knowledge, it is the only economic evaluation of a mindfulness intervention for students. The choice of measures used allowed QALYs to be calculated.A key weakness of the study is the very narrow costing perspective adopted—that of the UCS. This perspective likely captures the majority of costs of directly delivering the intervention, but may well miss wider impacts. A natural perspective to adopt would be that of the university, but collecting required information for such a wide and multidomain perspective (eg, details on tuition fees and use of other student support services) would be very challenging.A further weakness is that in costing, we have focused exclusively on the costs of staff time, as measured by salary plus ‘on-costs’ (eg, such as employers’ pension and national insurance costs—see The primary analysis was a cost-utility analysis