The incorporation of public opinions in health priority setting and health policy decision making is a challenging process. There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that public participation in health policy decision making is associated to health systems performance and sustainability, but the strategy to achieve it remains an under-investigate issue . Results from the present study revealed that the “severity of disease”, “age”, “type of disease”, “health improvement after treatment”, “cost of treatment” and “healthy lifestyle” should be considered as criteria in healthcare priorities setting. Moreover, it was identified that “severity of disease”, “age” and “type of disease” were the attributes with the highest importance. This may be attributed to the fact that the study was carried out during the financial crisis in Cyprus which implies that health care needs limited resources. A critical point for the integration of public preferences in health policy decision making is whether they lead to increase or reduce of inequalities in health . Since vulnerable groups are affected disproportionally by health inequalities they should have a say in healthcare priority setting. Thus, it should be clearly defined what we mean by the term “public participation”. Are vulnerable and disadvantaged groups included or just the general population? On the other hand, we should not be focused only on vulnerable groups, because the healthcare system should be accessible and effective for all. This implies that different sources of information and different strategies of data collection should be implemented in order to ensure that all population’ groups are included and the data collected are representative and reliable.