In both academic and government discussion of the performance of the internal market, lack of "good quality" information on prices is seen as a major impediment to the emergence of a competitive market. The National Steering Group on Costing was established to help NHS units improve the quality...

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 Labour...

<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...

National income accounting practice is to weight health service activities by their cost so that they can be aggregated into an output index. Quality changes are ignored. We propose an 'ideal' value weighted output index in which the value attached to each output reflects its contribution to...

No Abstract

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...