Hospital and Community Service Unit Costs

Reference Costs provide indicators of the unit costs of hospital and community services at trust and hospital level. The data is derived from electronic hospital activity systems and Health and Social Care trust financial returns. Two versions exist, covering the financial years 2014-15 and 2015-16.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking hospital service costs against national averages based on unit cost indicators.
• Analyzing financial efficiency of Health and Social Care trusts using derived financial returns.
• Modeling resource allocation for hospital and community services using activity system data.

Strengths

• Data is sourced from official electronic hospital activity systems and financial returns.
• Provides unit cost indicators at both trust and individual hospital levels.
• Available under the Open Government Licence (OGL-UK-3.0).

Limitations

• Column names and specific data structure are not provided in the source descriptions.
• Dataset size and row counts are unknown, limiting assessment of comprehensiveness.
• Data is from 2014-16 and may not reflect current costs.

Provenance

Source

OpenDataNI

Collection Method

Derived from electronic hospital activity systems and Health and Social Care trust financial and information returns.

Time Range

2014-15 to 2015-16

Freshness

Last updated metadata indicates 2026-07-08, but the underlying data is from 2015-16.

Geography

United Kingdom (specifically Northern Ireland, implied by HSC trusts and OpenDataNI)