Managing informed purchasing: A survey of decision makers Available to Purchase

As part of an ongoing study developing and evaluating the use of programme budgeting (PB) and marginal analysis (MA) within purchasing organizations, conducts a survey of a health authorities’ requirements of a decision‐making tool based on PBMA. PB is a management decision‐making system. It provides a summary of resource use categorized according to the programme or end product to which it applies. This explicit description of current activities focuses attention on competition for resources among programmes and on the effectiveness of resource use within programmes. MA is an economist’s tool to evaluate options for changing the balance of resource use between or within programmes. Finds general support for PBMA techniques, although this waned with the higher functions of the tool. There was consensus that a health authority ought to know fundamentals like, for example, what proportion it spends on tackling coronary heart disease; and a majority view that PB will assist in revealing the key margins for service review