Letters
Use of "population served" distorted findings
EDITOR,--M A Richards and J C Parrott raise important issues about tertiary cancer services.1 Sadly, their paper does not contribute to our understanding of benchmarking for tertiary cancer centres because the calculation of population denominators is seriously flawed. The standard method of calculating catchment populations for specific services uses the proportions of current activity provided by different providers to allocate a district's resident population to those providers.2 The key principle is that the catchment populations of all providers add up to the total populations of the districts considered.Instead, Richards and Parrott use the concept of "population served," which involves classifying districts as local or distant and exclusive or shared and then allocating the populations of shared districts by relating activity for them to activity for the host population.
This definition of population served seriously distorts the findings.
Visualise three districts, X, Y, and Z. Each has a population of
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Relevant Article
- Tertiary cancer services in Britain: benchmarking study of activity and facilities at 12 specialist centres
- M A Richards and J C Parrott
BMJ 1996 313: 347-349.[Abstract] [Full Text]
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