Isn’t the allocation skewed because people access more services where they are available ?
A. Controlling for the impact of supply is a key aspect of the Arbuthnott Formula. Estimates of the relationship between the use of services and indicators of morbidity and life circumstances do take into account of the influence of supply (or accessibility). Accessibility is essentially calculated as a distance weighted beds per head of population. Supply scores are used in the regression to control for supply contamination. In Fair Shares for All, the access measures used covered a number of types of hospital bed provision, local authority residential homes and private nursing homes — together with some measures relating only to the prescribing work (such as whether the practice was a dispensing practice). In the post-consultation work a range of other social work indicators relating to access to day care places and home help provision were also obtained and tested out in the modelling. This was done to address any concerns about the model not picking up sufficient information on alt
