Priority setting of health interventions is generally considered as a valuable approach to support low- and
middle-income countries (LMICs) in their strive for universal health coverage (UHC). However, present
initiatives on priority setting are mainly geared towards the development of more cost-effectiveness information,
and this evidence does not sufficiently support countries to make optimal choices. The reason is that priority
setting is in reality a value-laden political process in which multiple criteria beyond cost-effectiveness are
important, and stakeholders often justifiably disagree about the relative importance of these criteria. Here, we
propose the use of ‘evidence-informed deliberative processes’ as an approach that does explicitly recognise
priority setting as a political process and an intrinsically complex task. In these processes, deliberation between
stakeholders is crucial to identify, reflect and learn about the meaning and importance of values, informed by
evidence on these values. Such processes then result in the use of a broader range of explicit criteria that can be
seen as the product of both international learning (‘core’ criteria, which include eg, cost-effectiveness, priority
to the worse off, and financial protection) and learning among local stakeholders (‘contextual’ criteria). We
believe that, with these evidence-informed deliberative processes in place, priority setting can provide a more
meaningful contribution to achieving UHC