Impact of government spending and future challenges

In Finland, the SOME model, which has also been regionalised in the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, is used to assess the care sectors and current transfers. The model covers the structure of social services and health care and income transfers in quite a detailed manner. The material of the care sector covers the main forms of institutional and outpatient care services as well as the various forms of primary and specialised medical care at the regional and hospital district level. The same data aggregated from the counties' and hospital districts' data will be used at the national level, which means the distribution data for the starting year will be uniform. The forecasts produced by the model are used to assess the need for funding in the social and health care sectors and to assess the impacts of changes in the operating environment and, among other things, personnel scaling.

The model's forecasts have focused on the impact of the demographic structure on the development of expenditure. The calculation is based on the allocation of expenditure resulting from various measures to the annual age groups of men and women, in which case the population forecast can be used to assess how the volume of services will develop in the future. The calculation is based on the assumption that the distribution of expenditure between different measures within each age group will remain similar to the current one, but as the size of the age groups changes according to the population forecast, the total costs of the measures will change according to the change in the age groups. An alternative way of interpreting the calculation is to think that the result represents the costs of measures per client for different age groups, in which case the development of customer numbers by age group is predicted according to the population forecast. 

More information 

Juha Honkatukia
Chief Researcher
tel. +358 29 524 6011
[email protected]

Matti Pihlava 
Researcher
tel. +358 29 524 7840
[email protected]