Hospital Performance: Costs of acute admitted patients in public hospitals in 2011–12

Fair comparisons

The Authority has used five approaches to support national comparability of the relative efficiency of public hospitals:

• Designing the Comparable Cost of Care measure to include costs that are similarly accounted for across hospitals
• Standardisation of Cost per NWAU and Comparable Cost of Care to account for differences between hospitals in the types of services provided and complexity of patients admitted
• Rounding of costs to acknowledge any remaining uncertainty in the precision of estimates
• Suppression of results for hospitals in cases where cost data are not fully available or comparable
• Peer grouping of hospitals to allow for fairer comparisons to similar facilities using nationally agreed peer groups.

The methodology used by the Authority also adjusted for patients with characteristics that increased costs within hospitals to which they were admitted (for example, patients from rural areas). The result of that work is that the peer group averages are very similar across peered hospitals for both Cost per NWAU and Comparable Cost of Care.

This report presents comparison figures for the three largest hospital peer groups:

• Major metropolitan
• Large metropolitan
• Major regional.

For more detail on the methodology used in this report, see Hospital Performance: Costs of acute admitted patients in public hospitals in 2011–12, Technical Supplement.