Patients' views of priority setting in health care: an interview survey in one practice

Global Developments in Priority Setting in Health

Countries around the world are experiencing an ever-increasing need to make choices in investments in health and healthcare. This makes it incumbent upon them to have formal processes in place to optimize the legitimacy of eventual decisions. There is now growing experience among countries of the implementation of stakeholder participation, and a developing convergence of methods to support dec...

Norwegian Priority Setting in Practice – an Analysis of Waiting Time Patterns Across Medical Disciplines

Background Different strategies for addressing the challenge of prioritizing elective patients efficiently and fairly have been introduced in Norway. In the time period studied, there were three possible outcomes for elective patients that had been through the process of priority setting: (i) high priority with assigned individual maximum waiting time; (ii) low priority without a maximum waitin...

Priority setting in health care: Attitudes of physicians and patients

Background: The opinion of physicians clearly counts in prioritizing health care, but there is little information on the rationales underlying treatment decisions and whether these rationales are accepted by patients. Objective: To compare physicians and patients regarding their understanding and use of therapeutic benefit and treatment costs as criteria for prioritizing health care. Methods: S...

Health care priority setting: principles, practice and challenges

BACKGROUND: Health organizations the world over are required to set priorities and allocate resources within the constraint of limited funding. However, decision makers may not be well equipped to make explicit rationing decisions and as such often rely on historical or political resource allocation processes. One economic approach to priority setting which has gained momentum in practice over ...

Characterising Needs in Health Care Priority Setting