Cost of specific health treatments (FOI)

​Request

Information pertaining to the cost to the health service of:

• a hospital physiotherapy session

• back clinic appointment

• pain clinic appointment

• pelvic girdle pain (pregnancy) group physio session

• x-ray of 1 region limb or spinal film (if differing costs for specific zones)

• orthopaedic department consultation

• neurology department consultation

• head CT scan

• lower back MRI

Response

Currently, the Health and Social Services Department does not hold costing data for the above activities. We are in the process of implementing a new system that will produce costing information on activities.

The Health and Social Services Department (HSSD) knows the costs of running its various departments and the activities undertaken by its services. Costing techniques are applied in the most useful way to support the financial planning and budgetary control decisions at hand.

As they are not required operationally, HSSD has not produced detailed unit costs under the headings specified by this requestor. A project is underway to introduce new costing software and align costing methods broadly to UK standards. This will make a wider range of more detailed costs available by quarter 1 of 2018. HSSD aims to produce unit costs which are in keeping with UK NHS costing standards for public patients.

HSSD does have average high level costs for key activities within the total ‘basket’ of services delivered by HSSD. The ‘basket’ contains a mixture of very specialist interventions and simple activities. Outpatient attendance costs include an element for diagnostic and therapeutic services which are allocated across all outpatient episodes. As there are more straightforward outpatient attendances than complex ones, the average is skewed towards the lower end of the cost spectrum.

The table below shows a selection of average outpatient appointment costs for public patients by the requested specialties. It is not possible to extract individual diagnostic and therapeutic costs from multi-disciplinary attendance costs within the Freedom of Information time limits nor is it practical to divert resources from the costing project to provide bespoke costings to the requestor.

Further information on the costing standards HSSD are moving towards can be found at:

Healthcare costing standards for England

Article and regulation applied

Article 16 A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.