This study makes five contributions to knowledge on priority setting.
Evaluating success in priority setting has been difficult since there is little agreement on a definition of priority setting success.
Of these, 17 were experts on priority setting, and 12 were experts on breast cancer policies.
Accountability for Reasonableness (AFR) is an ethics-based approach to a legitimate and fair priority-setting process that builds upon four conditions: relevance, publicity, appeals, and enforcement, which facilitate agreement on priority-setting decisions and gain support for their implementation.
The degree of agreement in priority setting was analyzed by using intraclass correlation analysis (ICC) [ 26] and generalizability theory [ 27, 28].
In the absence of agreement about which values should ground priority setting decisions, there has been a shift in focus away from principles, towards the process of priority setting.
To date there has been no or little agreement on what constitute a successful priority setting.
When relevant values conflict, decision makers must rely on developing context-specific agreement in order to achieve priority setting success.
To our knowledge this is the first review of empirical studies on hospital level priority setting.
We adopt Gibson et al definition of efficient priority setting as one which improves institutional capacity for allocating resources and making priority setting decisions and providing worthwhile return on the time invested to set priorities [ 13].
Within the priority setting literature, the few studies that have examined pieces of successful priority setting [ 4, 10, 21, 28] are not in agreement on underlying assumptions (i.e. underlying values) and often conflict.
