Overview

Welcome to Scottish Health Service Costs.

Scottish Health Service Costs (known as the Costs Book) is the only source of published costs information for NHSScotland (NHSS), and provides a detailed analysis of where resources are spent in the NHSS.  This information is mainly derived from financial and statistical data compiled by Scottish Health Boards.  It is published by ISD with the support of the Scottish Government Health Department (SGHD) and is used mainly for comparison across health care providers to ensure efficiency and to benchmark costs.

Annual Accounts

The NHSS is primarily organised into 14 health boards and 8 special health boards along with the Mental Welfare Commission and Mental Health Tribunal.  The net operating cost of these bodies in 2006/07 recorded in their annual accounts amounted to  £8.9 billion.  A summary of the annual accounts is provided in the following report:

 Rep 086 [26KB] - NHS Board Operating Costs and Capital Expenditure 

SGHD are responsible for the administration of government finance for NHSScotland.  More information on the annual accounts of the NHS Boards is available from SGHD website.

Costs Book

The Costs Book is structured to analyse around 90% of the NHSS net operating costs, presenting information on the boards that provide hospital and community care directly to patients.  For 2006/07, this reflects health care expenditure within the 14 health board areas and at two special boards, namely the State Hospital and Golden Jubilee National Hospital - amounting to £7.8 billion.  In addition to this, information on two other special boards that provide direct patient care - Scottish Ambulance Service and National Services Scotland (including the Scottish Breast Screening Programme) - is shown separately in Special Boards. 

The Costs Book has financial information from each board for hospital and primary care services.  The primary care service is split into "community services" and "family health services".  The range of services covered in each sector include:

• hospital services - ranging from complex surgery by consultants at large city hospitals to outpatient clinics at rural community hospitals
• community services - home visits by district nurses, for example, or prevention services such as breast screening and health promotion
• family health services - provided by the family doctor (GP) service and the High Street dentists, opticians and pharmacists.

Costs Book - Latest - data for 2006/07, including the executive summary and detailed tables.  See Site Map.

Costs Archive - data for previous years.


SCOTTISH NATIONAL TARIFF PROJECT is one of the important developments that uses data collected via the Costs Book project.  Tariffs are based on national reference costs which provide unit cost information for a wide range of procedures and treatments carried out in Scottish hospitals.  The resulting tariffs are applied to cross-boundary flows (where patients resident in one health board area are treated in another board area) to give a more accurate measure of the cost of treating these patients.