Table 2. Research recommendations to address capacity needs for priority-setting, including understanding the capacities of different stakeholders in specific countries and tools to help capacity-building.

Stakeholder group	Research recommendations
Environment
Health system	• Further detailed review of established priority-setting agencies including those in Australia, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan, Canada, the UK explaining their roles in the particular contexts for which they were developed and noting the characteristics that might be most adaptable to conditions in LMICs.
Networks
Funders and development partners	• Develop, implement and evaluate common theories of change and indicators around priority-setting in health, so that investment efforts (in terms of funding, research and technical assistance) can be consolidated and strategically driven towards common outcomes. • Methodological specification as well as implementation of value for money principles, such as those espoused in the iDSI Reference Case, as well as ongoing reflection on the part of funders about their own capacity development needs, will help to accelerate the process.
Nodes (organisations) and Individuals
Consumers of evidence
Policy and professional decision makers	• Survey the capacities in policy and professional circles in LMICs (for instance in the iDSI collaborating countries: China, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Vietnam), and identify the training that exists for leaders in those fields. The intention will be to identify and share good practice from which all may learn and which might provide an agenda for more detailed work on the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the various interventions aimed at increasing decision-makers’ capacities to commission, use and monitor research.
Health service managers	• Review the existing training and support arrangements for health service managers and explore with selected groups the most cost-effective ways of meeting their needs in particular contexts, identifying appropriate syllabuses and methods of delivery through graduate training and continuing professional development courses and workshops. • Understand, at the methodological and policy levels, how concepts and methods of priority-setting and health technology assessment could be practically applied to resource allocation problems beyond individual healthcare interventions, and more broadly to healthcare delivery platforms and human resource issues.
Patients and the public	• Develop tools and approaches that will support decision-makers in identifying the purposes of their patient and public engagement strategies, and test out such tools and approaches in LMIC settings. The aim is to increase the likelihood that engagement strategies will be aligned with policy goals, support inclusion and representation of key stakeholders affected by priority-setting decisions. By facilitating inclusion of locally specific ethical considerations into priority-setting, and protect engagement activities from common pitfalls, this could ultimately improve decision-making and enable it to be more effective and fair.
Producers of evidence
Academic institutions, researchers and research managers	• Develop a handbook of best practices for understanding the needs of policy and professional decision-makers; identifying the extent to which such best practices are context-dependent, and the means of sharing them between policy, professional and research partners. The research will be qualitative and descriptive, embody both recommended principles and practical examples drawn from extensive consultation from both researchers and end users, and provide an agenda for more detailed work on the effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and fairness of the various ways of communication and knowledge translation.
Knowledge brokers
Knowledge brokers, including priority-setting institutions	• Identify knowledge brokers in countries, using tools such as social network analysis (Shearer et al. 2014), with the goal of influencing the key players who are strategically best placed to facilitate evidence-informed priority- setting. • Support the development of knowledge brokers’ technical and institutional capacities, including the capacity to convene and hand-hold other evidence generators together with evidence users (decision-makers).
Media organisations and journalists	• Through workshops and other platforms, convene journalists and editors to share and establish best practices for objective and impartial reporting of stories linked to priority-setting in health and to institutions set up by governments to make such decisions, as a means of informing and influencing the other stakeholder groups (including policymakers and the general public) • Understand and develop existing efforts for the networking and capacity-building of relevant journalists.

iDSI = International Decision Support Initiative; LMIC = low- and middle-income country