Application of costs
EVENTS, EVENT
We applied unit costs from the UK Department of Health annual National Reference Costs (2013/2014) [For the admitted patient care episodes, a cost for the relevant type of event (day case, elective, non-elective short stay or non-elective long stay) was matched to the HRG. The grouper software assigned UZ01Z error codes to events for which it was not possible to assign an HRG. UZ01Z costs were first published in (2014/15) [For procedure-driven outpatient events, unit costs were matched to the appropriate HRG. For all other outpatient events, information in relation to the main specialty and the type of medical staff was used to attach relevant unit costs. Missing values of the main specialty, or codes indicating ‘not a treatment function’ were assigned a General Medicine speciality code (300). Outpatient events that were assigned UZ01Z codes were treated as if they were the most common HRG (WF01A: Non-Admitted Face to Face Attendance, Follow-up).Where appropriate costs were missing from the Reference Costs, weighted means of similar events were used. All costs were inflated to 2020 costs (the most recently available year) using the NHS cost inflation index [