Global Developments in Priority Setting in Health

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...

Priority Setting: Right Answer to a Far Too Narrow Question?; Comment on “Global Developments in Priority Setting in Health”

In their recent editorial, Baltussen and colleagues provide a concise summary of the prevailing discourse on priority-setting in health policy. Their perspective is entirely consistent with current practice, yet they unintentionally demonstrate the narrowness and moral precariousness of that discourse and practice. I respond with demonstrations of the importance of ‘interrogating scarcity’ in a...

Breastfeeding promotion and priority setting in health.

An increase in exclusive breastfeeding prevalence can substantially reduce mortality and morbidity among infants. In this paper, estimates of the costs and impacts of three breastfeeding promotion programmes, implemented through maternity services in Brazil, Honduras and Mexico, are used to develop cost-effectiveness measures and these are compared with other health interventions. The results s...

Characterising Needs in Health Care Priority Setting

Aversion to health inequalities and priority setting in health care.

Traditionally aversion to health inequality is modelled through a concave utility function over health outcomes. Bleichrodt et al. [Bleichrodt, H., Diecidue E., Quiggin J., 2004. Equity weights in the allocation of health care: the rank-dependent QALY model. Journal of Health Economics 23, 157-171] have suggested a "dual" approach based on the introduction of explicit equity weights. The purpos...