Costing shared care

Growing interest in shared health care schemes over the last decade has received additional impetus with the introduction of GP fund holding and the internal market in health care provision. Ken Buckingham and colleagues report on the relative costs of such a scheme for asthma in comparison with the costs of conventional outpatient care. Data was collected during a randomised controlled trial of shared or integrated care for patients with chronic asthma, who had been referred to a hospital outpatient clinic.