Reference costs and the pursuit of efficiency in the 'new' NHS

Diane Dawson and Andrew Street

No 161chedp, Working Papers from Centre for Health Economics, University of York

Abstract: Both the White Paper, The New NHS, and the later consultation document, A National Framework for Assessing Performance, stress the need to develop new instruments to tackle inefficiency in the NHS. Among these instruments it has been proposed to benchmark Trusts, and by association Health Authorities, using Healthcare Resource Group (HRG) costs. The NHS Executive has published plans for a system of ‘Reference Costs’ that will itemise the cost of every treatment in every Trust. These reference costs will be derived from costing HRGs and are to be used for many purposes: benchmarking cost improvement, measuring relative efficiency, identifying best practice, funding transfers and costing health improvement programmes. This paper examines the construction of reference costs, considers incentives to use the information appropriately and asks whether a single accounting construct, the costed HRG, can be expected to contribute successfully to its many intended functions of regulation and management.

Keywords: performance measures; costing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 1998-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.york.ac.uk/media/che/documents/papers/d ... on%20Paper%20161.pdf First version, 1998 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chy:respap:161chedp

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Centre for Health Economics, University of York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gill Forder ().