International Journal of Health Policy and Management (Aug 2016)

Priority Setting Meets Multiple Streams: A Match to Be Further Examined?; Comment on “Introducing New Priority Setting and Resource Allocation Processes in a Canadian Healthcare Organization: A Case Study Analysis Informed by Multiple Streams Theory”

  • Jacqueline Margaret Cumming

DOI
https://doi.org/10.15171/ijhpm.2016.58
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5, no. 8
pp. 497 – 499

Abstract

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With demand for health services continuing to grow as populations age and new technologies emerge to meet health needs, healthcare policy-makers are under constant pressure to set priorities, ie, to make choices about the health services that can and cannot be funded within available resources. In a recent paper, Smith et al apply an influential policy studies framework – Kingdon’s multiple streams approach (MSA) – to explore the factors that explain why one health service delivery organization adopted a formal priority setting framework (in the form of programme budgeting and marginal analysis [PBMA]) to assist it in making priority setting decisions. MSA is a theory of agenda-setting, ie, how it is that different issues do or do not reach a decision-making point. In this paper, I reflect on the use of the MSA framework to explore priority setting processes and how the framework might be applied to similar cases in future.

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