BACKGROUND Fair prioritization of healthcare resources has been on the agenda for decades, but resource allocation dilemmas in clinical practice remain challenging. Can clinical ethics committees (CECs) be of help? The aim of the study was to explore whether and how CECs handle priority setting dilemmas and contribute to raising awareness of fairness concerns. METHOD Descriptions of activitie...

with demand for health services continuing to grow as populations age and new technologies emerge to meet health needs, healthcare policy-makers are under constant pressure to set priorities, ie, to make choices about the health services that can and cannot be funded within available resources. in a recent paper, smith et al apply an influential policy studies framework – kingdon’s multiple str...

background maternal health remains a central policy concern in vietnam. with a commitment to achieving the millennium development goal (mdg) 5 target of maternal mortality rate (mmr) of 70/100 000 by 2015, the ministry of health (moh) issued the national plan for safe motherhood (npsm) 2003-2010. in 2008, reproductive health, including safe motherhood (sm) became a national health target progra...

BACKGROUND Priority setting in health research is an emerging field. In Zambia, like many other African countries, various priority setting activities have been undertaken with a view to identify research activities to which the available resources can be targeted while at the same time maximising the health impact for resource allocation to support evidence-based decision-making. The aim of th...