Focussing conservation strategies on the derived priorities is considered a promising approach for a more efficient and standardized protection of biodiversity.
Ideally, a set of locally derived priorities would, collectively, serve to protect or conserve species that are most vulnerable at the global scale.
Given the interest in patient derived priorities for research, it was considered appropriate to adopt a participatory approach as the theoretical frame of reference for the study (Parkes and Panelli, 2001; Reason and Bradbury, 2001; Wright et al, 2006).
There are numerous methods introduced by researches for deriving priority weights in the AHP.
AHP is a theory of measurement through pairwise comparisons and relies on the judgments of experts to derive priority scales [33].
The measurement is done by comparing the judgement from experts to derive priority ranking.(Saaty, 2008) Multi criteria decision making can be used to improve classification accuracy which deal with large datasets.
It is a process based on the decomposition of a decision-making problem into a tree structured decisions' hierarchy and pairwise comparisons through the building of matrixes to derive priority scales and weights.
To derive priority weights for access to bariatric surgery for obese adults, from the perspective of the public.
This study extends our understanding of the publics' preferences for priority setting to the context of bariatric surgery, and derives priority weights that could be used to assist bodies responsible for commissioning bariatric services.
Furthermore, we illustrate how a performance-based analysis of the empirical results enables one to derive priorities and recommendations for future design iterations.
