Professor Susan Smith:

I will combine the questions on the capitation payment and the practice allowance because they are interconnected. The idea of a deprivation weighted capitation payment is that it is based on the patient rather than where the practice is, so a practice with higher numbers of very deprived patients would have patients with a higher weighted capitation payment. This is how it would work. This is one of the models used in the National Health Service, NHS. However, as the committee can see from the data from Scotland, it is not enough on its own. The practices need to be resourced in other ways as well as through weighted capitation payments. To answer Deputy O'Connell's question, various deprivation indices are used which are developed using CSO data. It is based on individual patient characteristics, and the deprivation is weighted based on these characteristics. Technically it is very easy to do. It is a bit of a challenge at present because we would largely need to use primary care reimbursement service, PCRS, data which need to be explored a little more because we would need to know where the patients live as opposed to where the practices are based.