[Opinion on health priorities in the community of Valencia]

In this study we have used a qualitative approach partially based on the Delphi technique to establish the ten priorities for health in the Valencian Community for the next five years. Two rounds of mail surveys were made sending questionnaires to 1834 people including Health Councillors of the Town Halls, nurses and doctors of the three valencian provinces. The overall response rate was 28.3%. The priorities which were perceived as most important by the respondents were the development of primary care, improvements in the management of health services and the development of preventive medicine. The fourth and fifth places of the ranking were: improvements of emergency services and increasing the budget devoted to hospital care. The 6th priority was preventive measures in cardiovascular diseases, the 7th actions against drug abuse, the 8th special attention to childhood and ageing populations and the last two priorities were protection of the environment and infectious diseases prevention. We consider this approach as useful to obtain additional valuable information complementary to the information obtained from traditional statistics or health surveys specially in the areas of management, diseases prevention and actions towards special groups of population.