Marginal Resource Allocation Explorer
Use a fixed budget to choose successive healthcare expansion steps. Compare your plan with the allocation that produces the greatest expected health gain from the illustrative options.
Build an allocation
Set the expansion budget, then select service steps. A later step can only be selected after the earlier step for that service.
What does the margin show?
The recommended plan evaluates every feasible combination within the selected budget while respecting the order of expansion steps.
See the marginal evidence
Each row represents one additional £40,000 expansion block. Expected health gain declines across successive steps, illustrating diminishing marginal returns. These values are synthetic and are not estimates for real services.
| Service | Expansion step | Additional cost | Additional QALYs | QALYs per £40,000 |
|---|
Method, assumptions and limitations
The explorer chooses the feasible combination with the greatest total expected QALYs within the selected budget. For a feasible plan, total QALYs forgone are separated into the loss from choosing lower-value steps at the same spending level and the additional health available from using any remaining budget. Expansion steps must be taken in order within each service because the second or third block represents expansion beyond the earlier level.
- All costs and QALYs are illustrative, certain and comparable across services.
- The tool assumes the expansion budget can be divided only into the displayed £40,000 blocks.
- The tool does not model equity, uncertainty, affordability beyond the stated budget, service dependencies or implementation constraints.
- A real decision requires context-specific evidence and deliberation; the mathematically highest expected QALY total is not automatically the final policy choice.