Health needs assessment is not required for priority setting

EDITOR —The series of articles on health needs assessment provided insights into how the approach could be used to describe health problems in populations and to identify inequalities in health and access to services.1 The authors of the articles failed to recognise, however, that prioritising healthcare services on the basis of need can lead to inefficient use of resources.

Allocating finite healthcare resources according to the total amount of ill health in the population —whether this is measured by lives …