UK Hospital and Community Service Unit Costs for 2016-17

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 Health and Social Care trust financial and information returns for the 2016-17 period. It was published by OpenDataNI and last updated on the platform in July 2026.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking hospital service costs across different trusts based on unit cost indicators.
• Analyzing financial efficiency of community health services based on trust-level cost data.
• Modeling healthcare expenditure for the 2016-17 fiscal year using derived financial returns.

Strengths

• Data is derived from official electronic hospital activity systems and financial returns.
• Provides cost indicators at both trust and individual hospital levels.
• Covers a range of hospital and community services for a specific fiscal year (2016-17).

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 2016-17.

Provenance

Source

OpenDataNI

Collection Method

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

Time Range

2016-17

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:32:30.597875; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United Kingdom, likely focusing on Northern Ireland given the publisher.