The costs of electrotherapy

The costing work presented here forms part of a wider critical review of electrotherapy equipment used by physiotherapists, which is being carried out at the Centre for Physiotherapy Research at King's College, University of London, and has been commissioned by the Department of Health. The Personal Social Services Research Unit at the University of Kent at Canterbury has provided the economic component to the research.

The general methodological principles used in costing electrotherapy are described. These provide the structure for calculating the costs of different types of treatment, to be assessed in a number of articles in this series. In this article the costing of ultrasound will be shown as an example of the application of the principles.

The costs of purchasing and maintaining electrotherapy equipment are referred to as marginal. That is, they are variable in comparison to the overall staff, departmental and hospital costs which remain fixed irrespective of the use of electrotherapy. Overall costs to the Health Service of purchasing new equipment are not negligible; they have been shown to be in the region of £1 1/2 million a year with capital investment of some £20 million (Ide and Partridge, 1988).