To ask the Minister of Health, Social Services and Public Safety whether his Department gathers statistics regarding the unmet need for Adult Social Care (i) regionally; and (ii) by Health and Social Care Trust, in order to target resources.

It is assumed that the term unmet need in the question refers to individuals in the population who require access to health services, but are unknown and subsequently have not been assessed for need.

Whilst my Department does not explicitly collect statistics on unmet need it does make an adjustment to the Capitation model to take account of the level of need in the population. It does this by using costed activity/service utilisation, together with other information derived from population surveys and making adjustments for levels of deprivation. A comparison is made between the assessed need for each Super Output Area (SOA) and the corresponding deprivation score for each SOA and based on the results of this an unmet need adjustment is made if required. As activity relating to Adult Social Care transcends a number of Programmes of Care (POCs) the measure of unmet needs is dispersed across POCs and it is therefore difficult to provide a separate measure of unmet need for Adult Social Care.