Remit
TAGRA was established in August 2008 with a remit to:
- Advise on the future maintenance and development of the Arbuthnott/NRAC formula for allocating resources to Health Boards for Hospital and Community Health Services and GP prescribing
- Advise when the individual elements of the formula should be refined and improved as new methods and data become available
- Consider issues raised in NRAC’s Final Report and by stakeholders, as required by the Scottish Government, to prioritise and commission the investigation of these issues.
- Ensure that the formula continues to allocate funds between Health Boards on a fair and equitable basis.
Core Criteria
Furthermore, the group agreed the following core criteria to guide the work of the group.
| Equity | the primary consideration should be to achieve the greatest possible accuracy in capturing the cost implications of variations in need between population groups and across the country, in order to develop a formula that delivers the greatest possible equity of access to health services. |
|---|---|
| Practicality | use should be made of good-quality, routinely-collected data, in order to produce an administratively feasible formula that can be readily updated. |
| Transparency | the rationale informing the formula’s methodology should be explicable and any judgements should be made explicit, although this should not lead to over-simplification of details which might add precision to the methods. |
| Objectivity | the formula should as far as possible be evidence-based, using as necessary the full range of available robust data. |
| Avoiding perverse incentives | the formula should guard against perverse incentives and any negative consequences which might threaten the integrity of the data. |
| Relevance | there is a need to avoid the dangers of extrapolation and to make explicit where hard information is being used about one aspect of a service to make some assumption about an area where information is less good or absent. |
| Stability | there should be a reasonable degree of year-to-year stability in the data sources feeding in to the formula. |
| Responsiveness | the formula should result in shifts in the allocation of resources in response to changes in the need for healthcare services. |
| Face validity | the outcome of any changes to the formula should be subjected to a ‘common-sense’ check. |
Membership
Membership of TAGRA is made up a mixture of health board members (mainly finance directors), academics/experts in the area, representatives from ISD (Information Services Division of NHS Scotland) and Analysts from the Health Department of the Scottish Government.
|
NAME |
ORGANISATION |
| Roger Black | ISD Scotland |
| Angela Campbell | Scottish Government |
| Martin Cheyne | Ayrshire & Arran Health Board |
| Garry Coutts | NHS Highland |
| Andrew Daly | NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde |
| Helene Irvine | NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde |
| Alan Gray | NHS Grampian |
| Edmund Anderson | ISD Scotland |
| Nick Kenton | NHS Highland |
| Stephen Logan | Grampian Health Board |
| Kirsty MacLachlan | NRS (National Records of Scotland) |
| Peter Martin | ISD Scotland |
| Christine McLaughlin | Scottish Government – CHAIR |
| Lynda Nicholson | Scottish Government |
| Paudric Osborne | Scottish Government |
| John Raine | NHS Borders |
| Fiona Ramsay | NHS Forth Valley |
| Diane Skatun | HERU (University of Aberdeen) |
| Matt Sutton | University of Manchester |
| George Walker | NHS Lothian |
The group will meet roughly 3 times a year and the work will be ongoing with no set end date.