Background. Prevention is a health care area which is clearly prioritized by the population compared to other health care areas such as curing a disease. Little is known about people's preferences of how prioritization of preventive services criteria should be carried out. Objectives. The study investigates the public's opinion regarding the importance of the prioritization criteria costs, benefits, adverse events and frequency of a disease. It also analyzes associations between the respondent's sociodemographics, heath status, lifestyle and their preferences. Materials and methods. Computer-assisted personal interviews were conducted with participants from a regional quota sampling. Participants were asked to indicate the importance of the prioritization criteria costs, benefits, adverse events and frequency of a disease and to state their sociodemographic- and lifestyle-related characteristics. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, logistic regression and the chi(2) test. Results and conclusion. In all, 103 people completed the survey. The results show that the majority of participants take into account the criteria costs, benefits, adverse events, and the frequency of the disease as prioritization criteria and the investigated factors hardly affect these opinions. For an equitable and fair distribution of preventive services, it is important to find a consensus on the weighting of the different criteria and to explicitly define prioritization criteria.
