Abstract
BackgroundIn countries such as Cyprus the financial crisis and the recession have severely affected the funding and priority setting of the health care system. There is evidence highlighting the importance of population’ preferences in designing priorities for health care settings. Although public preferences have been thorough analysed in many countries, there is a research gap in terms of simultaneously investigating the relative importance and the weight of differing and competing criteria for determining healthcare priority settings. The main objective of the study was tο investigate public preferences for the relative utility and weight of differing and competing criteria for health care priority setting in Cyprus.MethodsThe ‘conjoint analysis’ technique was applied to develop a ranking exercise. The aim of the study was to identify the preferences of the participants for alternative options. Participants were asked to grade in a priority order 16 hypothetical case scenarios of patients with different disease and of diverse socio-economic characteristics awaiting treatment. The sample was purposive and consisted of 100 Cypriots, selected from public locations all over the country.ResultsIt was revealed that the “severity of the disease” and the “age of the patient” were the key prioritization criteria. Participants assigned the smallest relative value to the criterion “healthy lifestyle”. More precisely, participants older than 35 years old assigned higher relative importance to “age”, while younger participants to the “severity of the disease”. The “healthy lifestyle” criterion was assigned to the lowest relative importance to by all participants.ConclusionIn Cyprus, public participation in health care priority setting is almost inexistent. Nonetheless, it seems that the public’s participation in this process could lead to a wider acceptance of the healthcare system especially as a result of the financial crisis and the upcoming reforms implemented such as the establishment of the General System of Health Insurance.
Highlights
In countries such as Cyprus the financial crisis and the recession have severely affected the funding and priority setting of the health care system
It becomes evident that younger patients, unhealthy lifestyle, acute and severe disease, large improvement in health and low cost of treatment are assigned with highest levels of utility
Health care priority setting in Cyprus does not take into consideration public preferences, as is the case in other countries and this seems to be the case in Germany as well, based on the findings of a similar study [6]
Summary
In countries such as Cyprus the financial crisis and the recession have severely affected the funding and priority setting of the health care system. There is evidence highlighting the importance of population’ preferences in designing priorities for health care settings. Public preferences have been thorough analysed in many countries, there is a research gap in terms of simultaneously investigating the relative importance and the weight of differing and competing criteria for determining healthcare priority settings. The main objective of the study was tο investigate public preferences for the relative utility and weight of differing and competing criteria for health care priority setting in Cyprus. Public spending on health has been increased worldwide, due to rising health needs and because of the medical and pharmaceutical innovation, the research Countries such as Sweden, Norway, England and Israel have developed guidelines and procedures to engage the public in priority setting [6, 7]. Research has shown that the public’s differing options may reflect the differences in educational level [10, 14, 18, 22, 23] while other studies do not attribute the differing options to education or personal traits [24]
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