Purpose: In order to create sustainable health systems, many countries are introducing ways to prioritise health services underpinned by a process of health technology assessment. While this approach requires technical judgements of clinical effectiveness and cost effectiveness, these are...

Purpose – This editorial aims to outline the context of healthcare priority‐setting, and summarise each of the other ten papers in this special edition. It introduces a new multidisciplinary research programme drawing on ethics, philosophy, health economics, political science and health...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the social values framework developed by Clark and Weale could be applied to publicly available data and to explore the concordance between the framework values and those present in the statements of decision‐making protocols of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on improving equitable access to health care through increased public and patient involvement (PPI) in prioritization decisions by discussing the conceptualization, scope and rationales of PPI in priority setting that inform...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the findings of this special issue and discusses the future challenges for policy, research and society. The findings suggest that challenges emerge as a result of legitimacy deficits of both consensus and contestatory modes of public...

Purpose – New hepatitis C medicines such as sofosbuvir underline the need to balance considerations of innovation, clinical evidence, budget impact and equity in health priority-setting. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of public participation in addressing these...