Technical deficiencies in RAWP

The report of the Resource Allocation Working Party' has been criticised on moral and political grounds, but some of the technical aspects have not been adequately discussed. Briefly, the RAWP procedure allocates available resources to regions according to estimates of population, adjusted for age and sex by reference to national hospital inpatient bed-usage rates. Some areas are "unhealthy" places to live in, compared with the national average, so should receive additional resources. To measure "unhealthiness" RAWP proposed the use of standardised mortality ratios as measures of demand for hospital services over and above that generated by the given age/sex structure of the population.