Impact of information and deliberation on the consistency of preferences for prioritization in health care - evidence from discrete choice experiments undertaken alongside citizens' juries.

Background: Public preferences are an important consideration for priority-setting. Critics suggest preferences of the public who are potentially naïve to the issue under consideration may lead to sub-optimal decisions. We assessed the impact of information and deliberation via a Citizens' Jury (CJ) or preference elicitation methods (Discrete Choice Experiment, DCE) on preferences for prioritizing access to bariatric surgery.

Methods: Preferences for seven prioritization criteria (e.g. obesity level, obesity-related comorbidities) were elicited from three groups who completed a DCE: (i) participants from two CJs ( n  = 28); (ii) controls who did not participate in the jury ( n  = 21); (iii) population sample ( n  = 1,994). Participants in the jury and control groups completed the DCE pre- and post-jury. DCE data were analyzed using multinomial logit models to derive "priority weights" for criteria for access to surgery. The rank order of criteria was compared across groups, time points and CJ recommendations.

Results: The extent to which the criteria were considered important were broadly consistent across groups and were similar to jury recommendations but with variation in the rank order. Preferences of jurors but not controls were more differentiated (that is, criteria were assigned a greater range of priority weights) after than before the jury. Juror preferences pre-jury were similar to that of the public but appeared to change during the course of the jury with greater priority given to a person with comorbidity. Conversely, controls appeared to give a lower priority to those with comorbidity and higher priority to treating very severe obesity after than before the jury.

Conclusion: Being informed and undertaking deliberation had little impact on the criteria that were considered to be relevant for prioritizing access to bariatric surgery but may have a small impact on the relative importance of criteria. CJs may clarify underlying rationale but may not provide substantially different prioritization recommendations compared to a DCE.