Specialty Costs
There are some 60 individual specialties identified by ISD for the patient collection schemes. For the Costs Book, some significant facilities (e.g. Intensive Care Unit) are treated as specialties and some sub-specialties are combined to groups (e.g. General Psychiatry which includes Forensic Psychiatry and Psychotherapy). The full list of specialties and AHP disciplines, for which information is collected for the Costs Book, is available in the following file:
Specialty Listing 
[33kb]
Expenditure
Hospital Running Costs taken from SFR 5.2 [1.8mb] are allocated across specialties, then by patient type (e.g. inpatients, daycases, outpatients - SFRs 5.3 to 5.9) and are presented in reports R040 to R048 as shown in the diagram below, i.e. the sum of the expenditure in the specialty reports for each hospital equates to hospital running costs (as presented in report R020).
Activity
Activity figures are taken from the ISD(S)1 dataset with other measures such as theatre hours and staffing WTEs coming from local records.
Reports
The data is available at hospital level (e.g. R040) or aggregated to NHS Board level (e.g. R040X).
The main specialty groupings are:
- Acute Surgical
- Acute Medical
- Maternity
- Geriatric Assessment
- General Psychiatry
- Geriatric Continuing Care
- Learning Disabilities
- Younger Physically Disabled
See also Outpatients summary page
Note
Low patient activity in a specialty, particularly at smaller hospitals or clinics, may result in unit costs that are outwith the average for that specialty. In some instances, hospitals may combine specialty activity for more robust costings.
