Reaching agreement in uncertain circumstances: the practice of evidence-based policy in the case of the Swedish National Guidelines for heart diseases

Abstract

This paper explores the practice of evidence-based policy in a Swedish healthcare context. The study focused on how policymakers in the specific working group, the Priority-Setting Group (PSG), handled the various forms of evidence and values and their competing rationalities, when producing the Swedish National Guidelines for heart diseases that are based on both clinical and economic evidence and are established to support explicit priority-setting in healthcare. The study contributes to the theoretical and practical debate on evidence-based policy (EBP) by illustrating how the practical tensions of coming to agreement were managed, to a large extent, through deliberation and by creativity.