Commentary Accountable priority setting for trust in health systems - the need for research into a new approach for strengthening sustainable health action in developing countries

Despite multiple efforts to strengthen health systems in low and middle income countries, intended sustainable improvements in health outcomes have not been shown. To date most priority setting initiatives in health systems have mainly focused on technical approaches involving information derived from burden of disease statistics, cost effectiveness analysis, and published clinical trials. However, priority setting involves value-laden choices and these technical approaches do not equip decision-makers to address a broader range of relevant values such as trust, equity, accountability and fairness that are of concern to other partners and, not least, the populations concerned. A new focus for priority setting is needed. Published: 24 October 2009 Health Research Policy and Systems 2009, 7:23 doi:10.1186/1478-4505-7-23 Received: 18 June 2009 Accepted: 24 October 2009 This article is available from: http://www.health-policy-systems.com/content/7/1/23 © 2009 Byskov et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.