CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The importance of setting research priorities in health in Argentina became relevant as a consequence of the economic and social crisis that the county had to confront in 2002. In this context, emerged the need to think how to allocate the scare resources in research in the most efficient way to give answers to the difficult sanitary situation. Then, in 2005, the creation of the Argentine Health Research Forum (FISA) gave a new impulse to setting research priorities as it charged an interdisciplinary working group (IWG) with the validation and implementation of the Combined Approach Matrix (CAM). During 2006-2008, the CAM was applied to set research priorities in fourteen socio-sanitary problems: Tuberculosis, Chagas, Diabetes, Tobacco Addiction, Maternal morbidity-mortality, Road Safety, Lower Acute Respiratory Infections in children, HIV/AIDS, Monogenic Disease and Congenital Anormalities, vascular neurological diseases, Alzheimer and other dementias, Epilepsy, health with indigenous people, and sociosanitary answers to problematic drugs uses. This process showed that the CAM is a helpful tool, feasible to be completed, which fosters dialogue between the various stakeholders or participants needing health research. The objective of this paper is to analyse retrospectively the difficulties, potentials and lessons learned in the setting research priorities process. The principal difficulty was related with the luck of tradition in the county of preparing this kind of debates and the scare experience in planning research.However, the continuity of the process had allowed to produce innovative solutions, that make as reflect upon the need of generating more opportunities for debate and reinforcing the importance of achieving a research agenda where all sectors are represented and their points of view taken in. To conquer this objective, a deliberate effort must be made to change Argentina´s research culture, process that needs time and continues actions.Research, as many other activities lacking resources to achieve all their possible objectives, requires priority setting. The lack of methodologies and, often, of transparency in the priority setting processes plus the poor support that, beyond the rhetorical wrappings, health research and especially health services research- receive are aspects that must be immediately addressed, particularly in developing countries. In Argentina, we applied the CAM to establish research priorities for disease and risk factors such as: Tuberculosis, Chagas, Diabetes, Tobacco Addiction, Maternal morbidity-mortality, Road Safety, Lower Acute Respiratory Infections in children, HIV/AIDS, Monogenic Disease and Congenital Anormalities, vascular neurological diseases, Alzheimer and other dementias, Epilepsy, health with indigenous people, and socio-sanitary answers to problematic drugs uses. The CAM was helpful not only to establish a list of priority research lines but also to set a state of art of the disease or risk factors that be were working on, which turns out to be a very useful tool for health decision-making. In addition, it proved to be very helpful to foster the dialogue between various stakeholders, researches, health professionals, civil society sectors and other actors related to health and health research. However, these outcomes were the result of a deliberate effort to change Argentina´s lack of tradition in preparing this kind of spaces where community and specialist together discusses what should be a priority in health. We consider that our experience is interesting to help other developing counties to engage in a setting research priorities process.

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