We read with interest the recent paper from Bouttell and colleagues on the use of synthetic control methodology (SCM) as a tool for the evaluation of population-level health interventions.
We welcome and support their conclusion that these methods provide a valuable addition to the methodological arsenal of those undertaking evaluations of public health, and other, interventions where randomisation is not possible or practical, or retrospectively where the opportunity for randomisation was missed. We echo their call for other researchers to adopt these methods more widely.
As the literature review reported in Bouttell et al was conducted up to February 2016, it has missed more recent developments in the field. In particular we would like to highlight a study which we recently published in this journal in which we describe a Bayesian structural time-series approach to SCM and apply it to estimate the impact of local alcohol licensing policies on hospital…