Efforts to improve the efficiency of the hospital sector in the National Health Service (NHS) have concentrated on measuring the unit costs of service provision. Hospitals identified as having high unit costs are considered poor performers. Several indices have been constructed to measure unit...

<title/> There has been a long history of hospital trust cost-efficiency targets being used in the National Health Service (NHS), but there is little evidence about whether they are effective in reducing hospital unit costs and reducing the dispersion of unit costs between trusts. In 1997, the new...