Table 1.

General characteristics of the 24 included empirical hospital priority-setting studies

Study	Country	Study design	Study setting	Priority setting activity	Study objectives
Reeleeder et al. (2006)	Canada	Qualitative cross-sectional study	Forty-six hospital in Ontario, Canada	Allocation of hospital resources (and budgets) between departments and service areas	To describe the role of leadership in health services priority setting from the perspective of hospital leaders, and provide a set of lessons for effective priority setting practices in healthcare facilities.
Gibson et al. (2005)	Canada	Qualitative case study	A tertiary-care teaching hospital with 612 acute-care beds, 543 long-term care beds, 74 nursery beds and 22 rehabilitation beds	Allocation of hospital resources (and budgets) between departments and service areas—hospital strategic planning process	To examine power differences associated with institutional roles in the context of management decision making about organizational priorities.
Bochner et al. (1994)	Australia	Qualitative case study	A tertiary referral hospital with about 900 beds	Health technology acquisition—medicines formulary management	To report experiences and initial responses from the hospital staff to a method to assign ranking priorities by means of a formal scoring system used for previously unfunded initiatives to allow their serial and orderly introduction into the hospital formulary.
Vissers (1995)	Denmark	Mixed methods case study	A hospital in Denmark	Health technology acquisition	To develop a model for resource allocation based on patient flow and to test this model on the allocation of hospital resources.
Durand-Zaleski (1996)	France	Interventional case study	A hospital in France	Health technology acquisition	To describe the testing of a tool to help decision makers establish priorities among medical projects by scoring and ranking projects.
Madden et al. (2005)	Canada	Qualitative case study	A network of three teaching hospitals in Toronto, Canada	Allocation of hospital resources (and budgets) between departments and service areas—clinical activity target setting process	To describe priority setting in a hospital and evaluate it using ‘accountability for reasonableness’, with particular attention to the appeal process.
Martin et al. (2003b)	Canada	Qualitative case study	A tertiary-care teaching hospital with 612 acute-care beds, 543 long-term care beds, 74 nursery beds and 22 rehabilitation beds	Allocation of hospital resources (and budgets) between departments and service areas—hospital strategic planning process	To describe priority setting in the context of a hospital strategic planning initiative and to evaluate using ‘accountability for reasonableness’.
Martin et al. (2003a,b)	Canada	Qualitative case study	A network of three teaching hospitals in Toronto, Canada	Health technology acquisition—medicines formulary management	To describe priority setting for new drugs in a hospital and to evaluate this process using ‘accountability for reasonableness’.
Rosenstein et al. (2003)	USA	Quantitative survey	Nineteen hospitals in the USA	Health technology acquisition	To describe the structure and processes used by Veterans Health Administration (VHA) west coast hospitals to perform new technology assessments.
Bell et al. (2004)	Canada	Qualitative case study	A large tertiary hospital in Toronto, Canada	Allocation of hospital resources (and budgets) between departments and service areas—priority setting during a disease outbreak Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)	To describe and evaluate priority setting in a hospital in response to SARS.
Reeleeder et al. (2005)	Canada	Quantitative survey	Forty-six hospital in Ontario, Canada	Allocation of hospital resources (and budgets) between departments and service areas	To elicit hospital decision makers’ self-report of the fairness of priority setting in their hospitals using ‘accountability for reasonableness’.
Greenberg et al. (2005)	Israel	Quantitative survey	Twenty-six acute care hospitals in Israel	Health technology acquisition	To explore the decision-making process in adopting new technologies at the hospital level.
Kapiriri and Martin (2006)	Uganda	Qualitative case study	A referral hospital with 1500 patient beds	Allocation of hospital resources (and budgets) between departments and service areas	To describe priority setting in a Ugandan hospital and to evaluate the description using the ethical framework, AFR.
Sharma et al. (2006)	Canada	Qualitative case study	A community hospital with 425 patient beds	Health technology acquisition—adoption of advanced laparoscopic surgery	To describe the current decision-making processes for the adoption of advanced laparoscopic surgery at a community hospital in Toronto, Canada and to analyse the decision-making process using the ethical framework AFR.
Ehlers et al. (2006)	Denmark	Quantitative survey	Thirty-three hospitals in Denmark	Health technology acquisition	To evaluate local decision support tools used in the Danish hospital sector from a theoretical and an empirical point of view.
Kapiriri et al. (2007)	Uganda, Canada, Norway	Qualitative case study	Three hospitals, one in Uganda, one in Canada and the other in Norway	Allocation of hospital resources (and budgets) between departments and service areas	To describe the process of healthcare priority setting in Ontario, Canada, Norway and Uganda at the macro, meso and micro levels and to evaluate the description using AFR and to identify lessons of good practice.
Danjoux et al. (2007)	Canada	Qualitative case study	An urban university academic health sciences centre with ∼500 patient beds	Health technology acquisition—endovascular aneurysm repair	To describe and evaluate the decision-making process for the adoption of a new technology for repair of abdominal aortic aneurysms-endovascular aneurysm repair.
Gallego et al. (2007)	Australia	Qualitative case study	A 300-bed university-affiliated, tertiary acute care hospital	Health technology acquisition—medicines formulary management	To describe the operations of the first reported High Cost Drug Sub-Committee in a public hospital in Australia and to evaluate the decision-making process using the ethical framework of AFR.
Haselkorn et al. (2007)	USA	Quantitative survey	Twenty-seven hospitals in the USA	Health technology acquisition	To assess the structure, processes and cultural support behind hospital committees for new technology planning and approval.
Gordon et al. (2009)	Argentina	Qualitative case study	An acute care tertiary level hospital with 350 beds	Allocation of hospital resources (and budgets) between departments and service areas	To describe priority setting in an acute care municipal level public hospital in Buenos Aires and to evaluate the priority setting process using an ethical framework for fair processes.
Valdebenito et al. (2009)	Chile	Qualitative case study	A 600 bed referral and teaching hospital in Chile	Allocation of hospital resources (and budgets) between departments and service areas—resource allocation do departments and services in the hospital	To describe, using qualitative case study methods, and evaluate, using the ethical framework ‘accountability for reasonableness’, priority setting in a hospital in Chile.
Mitchell et al. (2010)	USA	Qualitative case study	Four hospitals in the USA	Health technology acquisition	To describe two evidence reports from the hospital-based Health Technology Assessment (HTA) centre which required the integration of local data.
Govender et al. (2011)	South Africa	Quantitative survey	Twenty-one hospital managers in South Africa, number of hospitals not specified	Health technology acquisition	To adapt and use the Danish Center for Health Technology Assessment (DACEHTA) mini-HTA tool to assess past decisions made by South African hospital managers, as applied to selected medical devices.
Astley and Wake-Dyster (2001)	Australia	Qualitative case study	A division of women's and children’s hospital in Adelaide, Australia	Allocation of hospital resources (and budgets) between departments and service areas—reallocate hospital resources to maximize health outcomes by developing a new hospital service profile	To describe priority setting and resource allocation undertaken by a division of the women’s and children’s hospital, in Adelaide.