Reference Costs provide indicators of the unit costs of providing a range of hospital and community services at trust and hospital level, based on information derived from electronic hospital activity systems and HSC trust financial and information returns 2013-14. The dataset is published by OpenDataNI under the OGL-UK-3.0 license.
Use Cases
- Benchmarking hospital service costs based on unit cost indicators.
- Analyzing financial efficiency of NHS trusts based on reference cost data.
- Modeling healthcare expenditure for hospital and community services.
Strengths
- Data is derived from official electronic hospital activity systems and financial returns.
- Covers a range of hospital and community services at both trust and hospital level.
- Provides unit cost indicators for the 2013-14 financial year.
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
- Data may reflect temporal bias inherent to the 2013-14 period.
Provenance
- Source
- OpenDataNI
- Collection Method
- Derived from electronic hospital activity systems and HSC trust financial and information returns.
- Time Range
- 2013-14
- Freshness
- Last updated 2026-07-08 13:33:29.577389; freshness should be verified.
- Geography
- United Kingdom (likely Northern Ireland, given OpenDataNI)