Approved costing guidance
Costing principles and guidance for providers of NHS-funded services.
Applies to England
Documents
Details
This guidance aims to:
- set out the costing principles and standards, and guidance for both reference costs and PLICS (patient level information and costing systems) collections for the year
- explain the approach to costing and cost collection that we are encouraging providers of NHS services to adopt
- tell NHS providers how to comply with the pricing conditions of Monitor’s provider licence that relate to recording of costs
- support the continuous improvement of costing processes in the NHS
How the document is made up
The updated guidance has 4 chapters:
- Principles of costing (prepared by Monitor)
- HFMA’s clinical costing standards 2016/17
- Reference costs guidance for 2015/16 (prepared by the Department of Health)
- PLICS acute collection guidance for 2015/16 (prepared by Monitor)
Costing templates
Alongside the guidance, we’ve also published 3 templates:
- PLICS collection template for the 2015/16 collection
- MAQS template for the acute sector (developed jointly by HFMA and Monitor)
- updated MAQS template for the mental health sector (developed jointly by HFMA and Monitor)
Further guidance from HFMA
HFMA has published 2 guidance papers, on behalf of Monitor, which will be helpful to costing practitioners for use alongside our ‘Approved costing guidance’:
- Improving the quality of source information for costing in acute and community services
- Understanding the general ledger for costing
Collection of 2015-16 mental health PLICS data
We developed this template to collect 2015/16 patient-level cost data from two mental health service providers in order to assist them with their costing processes. We intend to develop a mental health cost collection over the next 2-3 years to ensure all service providers in this sector have the opportunity to submit patient-level cost data to us and provide a good intermediate step for those that are yet to engage in the costing transformation programme (CTP) process.
This is not the new CTP activity/resource style collection template but is similar to the voluntary PLICS collection we have run for acute trusts over the last three years.
If you have any questions about the template, please get in contact with us at [email protected].
Updates to this page
Published 11 February 2015Last updated 1 August 2016 + show all updates
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The PLICS collection template has been updated.
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We’ve updated our 'Approved costing guidance'. We recommend that costing practitioners review and update their costing processes and costing systems in line with the updated guidance.
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Added additional guidance to help NHS providers with the 2014/15 PLICS collection.
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We have published information on how NHS providers can take part in the PLICS collection for 2014/15.
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Added new attachment: Materiality and quality score (MAQS) collection template – Mental Health
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First published.