Reference Costs provide indicators of the unit costs of providing a range of hospital and community services at trust and hospital level. The data is derived from electronic hospital activity systems and HSC trust financial and information returns for the 2015-16 period. It 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 community health services based on trust-level cost data.
- Comparing expenditure across different health trusts based on reported financial returns.
Strengths
- Data covers a specific fiscal year (2015-16), providing a consistent time snapshot.
- Cost indicators are provided at both trust and hospital levels, allowing for granular analysis.
- Data is derived from official financial and information returns, suggesting an authoritative source.
Limitations
- Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Freshness should be verified as the data is from 2015-16, despite a recent metadata update.
Provenance
- Source
- OpenDataNI
- Collection Method
- Derived from electronic hospital activity systems and HSC trust financial and information returns.
- Time Range
- 2015-16
- Freshness
- Data covers 2015-16; metadata last updated 2026-07-08.
- Geography
- United Kingdom (Health Trust level)