Background: A wide range of preventive, treatment, and care programs for HIV/AIDS are currently available and\r\nsome of them have been implemented in Thailand. Policy makers are now facing challenges on how the scarce\r\nresources for HIV/AIDS control can be spent more wisely. Although effectiveness and cost-effectiveness information\r\nis useful for guiding policy decisions, empirical evidence indicates the importance of other criteria, such as equity\r\nand the characteristics of the target population, also play important roles in priority setting. This study aims to\r\nexperiment with the use of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to prioritise interventions in HIV/AIDS control in\r\nThailand.\r\nMethods: We used MCDA to rank 40 HIV/AIDS interventions on the basis of the priority setting criteria put forward\r\nby three groups of stakeholders including policy makers, people living with HIV/AIDs (PLWHA), and village health\r\nvolunteers (VHVs). MCDA incorporated an explicit component of deliberation to let stakeholders reflect on the rank\r\nordering, and adapt where necessary.\r\nResults: Upon deliberation, policy makers expressed a preference for programs that target high risk groups such as\r\nmen who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and female sex workers. The VHVs preferred interventions that\r\ntarget the youth or the general population, and gave lower priority to programs that target high risk groups.\r\nPLWHA gave all interventions the same priority. The rank order correlation between the priorities as expressed\r\nbefore and after deliberation was 37% among the policy makers and 46% among the VHVs.\r\nConclusion: This study documented the feasibility of MCDA to prioritize HIV/AIDS interventions in Thailand, and\r\nhas shown the usefulness of a deliberative process as an integrated component of MCDA. MCDA holds potential\r\nto contribute to a more transparent and accountable priority setting process, and further application of this\r\napproach in the prioritisation of health interventions is warranted.
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