[Women and children first?....]

The goal of the National Health System (SNS in its Spanish acronym) does not consist in distributing to everyone an identical dose of health services but in establishing a balance between those who are ill and those who are healthy in the course of their lives, and concentrating its interventions on those who are worse. In an advanced health care system, there are very few actions by health personnel that can be assessed as "lives saved": more often than not, these actions manage to delay the end and are occasionally limited to improving the quality of the years patients live, without extending their number. It is therefore clearly necessary to find appropriate units of measurement to assess the benefits and utility of all health-related procedures. When effecting a cost-effectiveness study and assessing the results obtained, it is necessary to differentiate between quality of life (personal), utility (personal) and the utility of the procedure or process when applied to our patients. This utility is determined by means of the additional quality and quantity of life, measured in a single unit, QALY, but this cost-effectiveness analysis would be constrained in patients with a shortened life expectancy and/or reduced quality of life due to old age or degenerative disease, thus skewing the distribution of resources in favour of younger population groups. In order to redress this situation, the use of corrective measurements such as EQALY is proposed. We believe that neither age nor illness in themselves limit the application of resources, providing that we can prove a useful result for the patient.