Universal health coverage (UHC) is high on the global health agenda, and priority setting is fundamental to the fair and efficient pursuit of this goal. In a recent editorial, Rob Baltussen and colleagues point to the need to go beyond evidence on cost-effectiveness and call for evidence-informed deliberative processes when setting priorities for UHC. Such processes are crucial at every step on the path to UHC, and hopefully we will see intensified efforts to develop and implement processes of this kind in the coming years. However, if this does happen, it will be essential to ensure a sufficiently broad scope in at least two respects. First, the design of evidence-informed priority-setting processes needs to go beyond a simple view on the relationship between evidence and policy and adapt to a diverse set of factors shaping this relationship. Second, these processes should go beyond a focus on clinical services to accommodate also public health interventions. Together, this can help strengthen priority-setting processes and bolster progress towards UHC and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Keywords: Evidence-Informed Deliberative Processes; Priority Setting; Public Health Interventions; Universal Health Coverage (UHC).
© 2017 The Author(s); Published by Kerman University of Medical Sciences. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.