Reference Costs provide indicators of the unit costs of providing a range of hospital and community services at trust and hospital level, based on information derived from electronic hospital activity systems and HSC trust financial and information returns.

What information is used for?

The information is used to contribute to performance monitoring of the HSC system, policy formulation and evaluation, and responding to Assembly Questions and other information requests.

Note that the quality of such unit costs is dependent on how completely, precisely and consistently underlying activity data is capable of being defined and recorded and how precisely costs are capable of being apportioned to activity.

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