Background: Identifying and prioritising systematic review topics that address stakeholders’ interests is not easy, particularly when time and resources are constrained. The Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research recently funded a two-year initiative in South Africa to conduct four systematic reviews on health systems questions. Central to the initiative was engagement with stakeholders to identify and select priority review questions.
Objectives: To share lessons learned in engaging stakeholders and identifying their priorities for new systematic reviews.
Results: We used a multi-step process to identify priority topics for reviews. We invited 154 public health policymakers, managers, providers and researchers across sub-Saharan Africa to submit priority topics for health system reviews. Ninety topics were received. A core team then grouped these into broad themes; transformed these themes into systematic review questions; and searched for existing reviews on these questions. This resulted in a shortlist of 39 review questions. A small advisory panel then used an iterative process to select four review topics. This included ranking each question as high or low priority and discussions within the panel to resolve differences in ratings.
Conclusions: The strengths of this prioritisation approach included: 1) rapid engagement of a wide range of health stakeholders; and 2) the identification of review questions that address important national and regional health systems questions. A key challenge was transforming the themes into review questions as, 1) many of the suggested topics were not questions that could best be addressed using systematic review methods; 2) some topics encompassed multiple questions that had to be split into reviewable questions; and 3) several topics were partly covered by existing reviews. In addition, the final shortlist of review questions was not verified with those who proposed these topics, and the questions may therefore have diverged from the original topic.