How is the remoteness adjustment for the 3 Island boards calculated?
All Boards receive a remoteness adjustment which is a combination of an adjustment for hospital services and community services. For hospital – Orkney, Shetland and Western Isles all receive a uniform adjustment. This was based on the decision by the Steering group that all 3 Island Boards face the same scale of additional costs in providing hospital care. The rationale behind using a uniform adjustment was partly driven by the fact that there was no evidence to suggest that the differences in the extent to which remoteness influences their hospital costs was material enough to justify separate adjustments. In addition, the Island Boards were grouped together as a single observation in the analysis. This is simply because numbers for each island Board are quite small, and there were concerns about data quality. For Community – Separate calculated adjustments were applied. The relevant community adjustments were calculated to be 12.5% for Orkney, 27% for Shetland and 27.1% for Western I
