UK Outpatient Appointment Reference Costs for 2017-2018

Reference Costs for 2017-2018 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. It was 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 outpatient services based on trust-level data
• Modeling healthcare expenditure for 2017-2018 based on activity and financial returns

Strengths

• Data covers the 2017-2018 financial year, providing a specific temporal snapshot.
• Cost indicators are provided at both trust and hospital levels, offering two scales of analysis.
• Derived from official electronic hospital activity systems and financial returns, suggesting an administrative source.

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 geographic and institutional bias inherent to the UK's National Health Service structure.

Provenance

Source

OpenDataNI

Collection Method

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

Time Range

2017-2018

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:32:50.551706; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United Kingdom (likely focusing on Northern Ireland given the publisher)