Trust Reference Costs
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.
General Explanatory Notes and Caveats
The figures are sourced from Trust Cost Submissions. These figures represent actual expenditure including any non-recurrent expenditure by Trusts.
Figures quoted are fully absorbed costs; this means figures include direct, indirect, overheads and capital charges costs. Consequently, we urge caution in any consideration of comparability of expenditure basis across other regions outside of NI.
Costs have been collected from Trusts through the regional patient level costing system. This is the third year of use, which is also impacted by further issues noted within each yearly webpage below and therefore note that costs may not be fully mature.
Northern Irish Unit Costs are the full reported unit cost; i.e. they include costs that are 'unbundled' in NHS England such as high cost drugs. As such NI Costs are not directly comparable with NHSE published unit costs.
In Northern Ireland, outpatient with procedure is aggregated with standard outpatient activity. As such costs will not be comparable to other jurisdictions where outpatient with procedure is clinically coded and separately identified and costed.
2023/24 provides the second set of cost data submitted by Health & Social Care Trusts through the regional Patient Level Information Costing System. As such the costs may not be fully mature.
If you have any queries on the cost data or would like more information, please contact costing@hscni.net
Trust Reference Costs – 2024/25