However, the public were not consulted in the initial development of the criteria, nor were the public involved in any advisory committees developing priority setting criteria.
Consequently, any attempts to develop a priority setting process must rely on the critical appraisal of the existing literature, expert consensus, and the relevance and necessities of the local socio-political and policy environment.
Although criteria have been developed for priority setting of new health technologies for early assessment, these are generally applied to novel therapeutic agents and interventions [ 13].
To assist decision-makers in developing fair priority setting processes, we conducted one-day workshops for Board members and senior administrators at three Canadian academic health science centres (Saskatoon Health Region, Kingston General Hospital and The Ottawa Hospital), who were seeking ethics advice on how to improve priority setting in their organisations.
The UK National Health Service (NHS) first developed formal research priority setting processes in 1991 with the launch of the NHS Research and Development Programme.
Engaging the medical leadership in a decision-making role was identified as key to developing a successful priority setting process.
Another theme, focussing on managing and preventing obesity, developed a formal priority setting process through advice from the steering committee linked to tensions of differing stakeholder views; between academics and services, and between providers and commissioners of services.
Knowledge about what weight is actually given to the key criteria in decisions concerning different health conditions and interventions could be useful in the process of developing tools for priority setting and drawing up guidelines that are perceived as useful in PHC.
These efforts should be combined with the work to develop new approaches to priority setting, data generation, and management of remaining uncertainties.
This conceptual mapping of criteria, based on well-established health system frameworks, will further develop the field of priority setting by assisting decision makers in the identification of multiple criteria for selection of health interventions.
