Requirements of structure and resource for an adequate audiology service in the post-Griffiths Health Service

Planning the development of services in audiology has been hampered by lack of an explicit set of recommendations concerning the range of services to be offered and their detailed procedural content. We provide this and bracket each service component with its resource requirements, indicating roughly what it should cost to introduce or appropriately deliver each component. We provide such a list, distinguishing between routine services requiring to be organised at health district level and those more specialised (low-patient-volume) services that are more appropriately centralised. This framework encourages explicit decisions as to what services are made available at each site, in the light of economic and other factors, and allows of contracting between districts to meet the needs of the population, rather than assuming a fixed model for a district service.