Does the Level of Education Affect the Preferences for Prioritizing Health Resources?

If people feel that the decisions made by health authorities are the result of the public’s points of view, they will accept them without any question. This is a descriptive‐analytic cross‐sectional study in which we used the DCE (Discrete choice experiment) technique to elicit the public’s preferences for individuals with different education levels in Tehran in 2017. The study findings indicated that for individuals with a bachelor’s degree, treatment of patients suffering from communicable diseases is the top priority (odds ratio = 2.79), while for those with a master’s and doctoral degree, the most important criteria for prioritizing resources were severity of disease (odds ratio = 2.66) and benefit from treatment (odds ratio = 2.38), respectively. The study results will help healthcare policy and decision-makers to better understand and analyze the causes of differences in society members' behaviors.