Given limited resources, priority setting or choice making will remain a reality at all levels of publicly funded healthcare across countries for many years to come. The pressures may well be even more acute as the impact of the economic crisis of 2008 continues to play out but, even as...

Debate over healthcare often focuses on two key issues: quality and cost. However, because of the unique characteristics of healthcare, this relationship is not as simple as it might seem. A recent Supreme Court of Canada judgement directly addressing aspects of quality of care, combined with...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a detailed case study of the evaluation strategies of a complex, multi-faceted response to a public health emergency: drug-related overdose deaths. It sets out the challenges of evaluating such a complex response and how they were overcome. It...

Purpose: Despite growing attention to physician engagement there is a lack of literature to guide the development of physician-led interventions. A scoping review was conducted to describe physician-led strategies that have been implemented to promote increased physician engagement in acute...

Purpose: Current conditions have intensified the need for health systems to engage in the difficult task of priority setting. As the search for a “magic bullet” is replaced by an appreciation for the interplay between evidence, interests, culture, and outcomes, progress in relation to these...

Spurred by a desire to improve quality of care and to understand the relative value of medical treatments, there has been a recent surge of interest in publicly funded comparative effectiveness research (CER) in the US. As health technology assessment (HTA) shares some of the same goals as CER,...

Programme budgeting and marginal analysis (PBMA) is a priority setting approach that assists decision makers in choosing among resource demands. This paper describes and evaluates the process of implementing PBMA in a Canadian regional health authority, and draws out key lessons learned from...

Ten years ago, Holm's highly influential paper "Goodbye to the simple solutions: the second phase of priority setting" was published [Holm S. Goodbye to the simple solutions: the second phase of priority setting in health care. British Medical Journal 1998;317:1000-7]. Whilst attending the 2nd...

Due to resource scarcity, every health system worldwide must decide what services to fund, and conversely, what services not to fund. In order to institute and refine a macro-level priority setting framework within a large, urban health authority in Alberta, Canada, researchers and decision...