The Right and Wrong Use of Resources

Abstract

For many years we have heard the repeated complaint that more resources should be devoted to health in Britain. Nearly all the other advanced countries, we are told, spend more than we do. In the United States 8.6% of the GNP is devoted to health care, a figure that has been rising for years and on present trends will exceed 10% in the early 1980s, whereas in Britain we only spend about 6% of the GNP on health. We read article after article in both the lay and medical press about these matters. A leading article in The Times, 12 July, 1978 was entitled ‘Sickness of the Health Service’ and the situation was assessed in the light of the Chairman’s address at the Annual Representative Meeting of the British Medical Association. In this address he claimed that ‘standards were rapidly deteriorating, service was impersonal and inadequate, and the idealism of those who provided it was being dissipated by lack of resources’.