Module / Supporting quality care through patient-level costing

Overview

In a rapidly changing NHS, this module gives an understanding of the importance of costing fundamentals in healthcare. This knowledge is key to recognising how clinical decisions affect the consumption of resources used to treat patients. Costing has a significant role to play in identifying variation in health services, when linked to outcomes and quality improvement initiatives. In the current financial context, the NHS needs to do things differently – this means clinical and financial staff working increasingly closely, finding new ways of delivering care and the best possible value for the taxpayer. 
This module will support learners to understand how costing works in the NHS and the challenge of capturing complex data to facilitate accurate and meaningful costing. It addresses the issues of communicating and engaging with information to improve patient outcomes and value for money across the NHS.  It will explore how NHS organisations and local health economies can use costing data as operational intelligence, link it with outcomes, and use it to support evidence-based decision-making. It will also provide insight into what needs to change and barriers to implementing change.