Health Trust Reference Costs for Hospital and Community Services, 2019-20

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 2019-20 period. It is published by OpenDataNI under the OGL-UK-3.0 license.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking hospital service unit costs across different trusts based on the reported cost indicators.
• Analyzing financial efficiency of community health services based on trust-level cost data.
• Modeling healthcare expenditure and resource allocation for the 2019-20 fiscal year.

Strengths

• Data is derived from official electronic hospital activity systems and financial returns.
• Provides unit cost indicators at both trust and individual hospital levels.
• Covers a range of hospital and community services for a specific fiscal year (2019-20).

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 geographic and temporal bias inherent to the UK's National Health Service structure for 2019-20.

Provenance

Source

OpenDataNI

Collection Method

Derived from electronic hospital activity systems and HSC trust financial and information returns.

Time Range

2019-20

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:33:16.160255; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United Kingdom (likely Northern Ireland, given the publisher)