Resource Allocation Working Party
He chaired the Advisory Committee to the Social Medicine and Health Services Research Unit at St Thomas' Hospital.He drew the attention of the Committee to the problems of resource allocation and encouraged them to consider possible research to rectify this unacceptable situation.They produced a proposal for a complicated randomised controlled trial of different funding formulae, but the Minister, David Owen, rejected it as interesting but politically impossible.It came to the conclusion that Standardised Mortality Ratios were a reasonable indicator of regional variations in health care needs in the acute sector.The formula devised by the Resource Allocation Working Party survived until 1989 and did reduce the funding gap between the Northern regions and London.