UK Hospital Outpatient Appointment Costs for 2016-2017

Reference Costs data provides unit cost indicators for hospital and community services at the trust and hospital level. The dataset is derived from electronic hospital activity systems and financial returns for the 2016-2017 period. It is published by OpenDataNI under the OGL-UK-3.0 license.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking hospital service costs based on unit cost indicators mentioned in the description
• Analyzing financial efficiency of outpatient services based on trust-level cost data
• Modeling healthcare expenditure for specific appointment types across different UK trusts

Strengths

• Data covers a specific fiscal year (2016-2017), providing a consistent temporal snapshot.
• Cost indicators are provided at both trust and hospital levels, offering two scales of analysis.
• Data is derived from official electronic hospital activity systems and financial returns.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.
• Data may reflect temporal bias inherent to the 2016-2017 collection period.

Provenance

Source

OpenDataNI

Collection Method

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

Time Range

2016-2017

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:31:04.039057; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United Kingdom (likely Northern Ireland, given the publisher)