Expenditure on private health care must be taken into account

EDITOR—Diderichsen et al make a common mistake in their article comparing resource allocation in Britain and Sweden.1 The use of the word “Britain” is misleading because the resource allocation formula described in the article is not the British but the English formula. Some of the articles referenced include “English” in their titles but are represented by Diderichsen et al as referring to Britain.1

Wales and Scotland do not use the English formula; they have different methods for allocating resources. 2 3 These methods may have their problems but at least the countries did not use the revision that was applied in England during 1991-5. Wales considered reducing the weighting applied to the standardised mortality ratio, in line with England, but rejected the proposal. Since 1991 the proxy for …