This article systematically reviewed a set of health policy papers on agenda setting and tests them against a specific priority-setting framework. The authors applied a commonly used Shiffman and Smith framework, which identified four conditions which would facilitate a priority issue being integrated into national policies and then acted on. The four conditions are actor power (the strength of the individuals and networks concerned with the issue), ideas (the ways in which those involved with the issue understand and portray it), context (environment in which actors operate) and issue characteristics. The framework was used to analyse 22 papers that analysed health agenda or priority-setting in low- and middle-income countries between 2000 and 2007. Over half of the papers analysed dealt with reproductive or maternal health or HIV and AIDS. Papers were analysed to identify the extent to which the four conditions were applied, in order to identify whether using such a theoretical approach would be useful when prospectively planning programmes that seek to set health policies or priorities. The framework was found to offer huge value in guiding cross-national as well as cross-policy research and analysis in a field that has been neglected and under-developed. The analysis demonstrated that comparative qualitative studies would be more rigorous if such frameworks were utilised prospectively. A few adjustments and conceptual refinements are proposed: using consideration of contestability or conflict as one of the characteristics of the problem being considered; and dividing the notion of ‘guiding institutions’ into two concepts - guiding organisations and the formal and informal norms and rules that make up judicial and legal institutions under political context. Framework synthesis offers a feasible, deductive approach to qualitative synthesis for health policy analysis research.1
1. Walt G, Gilson L. Can frameworks inform knowledge about health policy processes? Reviewing health policy papers on agenda setting and testing them against a specific priority-setting framework. Health Policy & Planning 2014;29(Suppl 3):iii6-iii22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/heapol/czu081.