Deciding Priorities for Public Health

Aims: Setting priorities in public health involves selection of indicators, domains and method of aggregation to get an index of health. Priority setting for universal health coverage needs methodologically sound method of aggregation of chosen indicators satisfying desirable properties. Methods: Avoiding problems of scaling, selection of weights and distributions of indicator scores, multiplicative aggregation of ratios of n-indicators in t-th year and a fixed base year is suggested satisfying country index = aggregation of index of all regions = aggregation of index of all domains. Results: The index can be computed separately for different vulnerable groups or on place of dwelling. Priorities can be decided by relative importance of the indicators computed by change in index due to unit increase in an indicator. The proposed index help in ranking of regions, identification of critical indicators, assessing progress/decline reflecting effectiveness of public health policies and programmes, drawing path of progress/decline of the index across time. Conclusions: Proposed method of aggregation irrespective of inter-correlations among the indicators, offering benefits of aggregation consistency has clear theoretical advantages and is recommended.