Unit Costs of Health and Social Care 2015

The latest edition builds on the success of previous volumes with the addition of several new services and

some changes requested by readers. Funded by the Department of Health and the Department for Education,

our continued aim of making unit cost estimates easily accessible to policy-makers, commissioners,

service providers and practitioners, we are encouraged that after one month, nearly 2000 downloads have

been recorded. With the vast majority of health and social care economic evaluations now citing the

publication, we are confident that our work is helping to ensure that a consistent approach is taken to

costing health and social care services throughout England.

As well as plenty of routine work to update the secondary sources of information underlying some

estimates, the 2015 edition contains the unit costs for several additional grades of health and social care

professionals which, responding to user feedback, are now also available in excel on our website. We have

also provided schema for several new services: acute medical units, level 3 rehabilitation services for

patients with complex rehabilitation needs, GP and nurse-led triage and residential care for people with

autism and complex needs. Also a guest editorial contains some of the implications of the 2014 Care Act

and assesses the potential impacts for social care markets, and three further articles look at vision rehabilitation

services, the use of resource-use questionnaires used in trial-based economic evaluations and finally

a new survey tool used to gather self-reported data about respondents’ care needs is discussed.