(12 years, 12 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Anne Milton)
In response to detailed enquiries about the information provided in answer to previous parliamentary questions on the cost of providing abortions in the NHS in England the Department has concluded that it should change the methodology it uses to produce estimates of the costs of abortions.
There are discrepancies between the activity figures for abortion returned to the chief medical officer and the data submitted as part of the reference cost collection, which is the Department’s wider collection of NHS cost and activity data. As a result of this, and the lack of detailed information about the price NHS organisations pay to independent sector providers for the provision of abortion, we will, in future, estimate the costs to the NHS of providing abortion using the activity figures provided to the chief medical officer and an average of the national tariff paid within the NHS for procedures including abortion. This is likely to overestimate total costs as we are aware that contracts with independent sector providers are generally at a lower price than the national tariff.
The table below shows the data used to produce previous estimates of abortion costs and the revised approach:
Time period: | 2009-10 financial year | Activity: 2010 calendar year Tariff: 2010-11 financial year | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Sources: | Reference cost collection4,5,6 | CMO abortion statistics6,7 Payments by Results Tariff | ||||
Reported activity | Unit Cost (£) | Total cost (£m) | Reported activity | Tariff (£) | Total cost (£m) | |
NHS1 | 118,000 | 695 | 83 | 64,000 | 680 | 44 |
Independent2 | 18,000 | 420 | 8 | 109,000 | 680 | 75 |
Total3 | 136,000 | 660 | 90 | 173,000 | 680 | 118 |
Notes: 1NHS provider 2NHS funded but delivered by independent sector provider 3The totals may not sum due to rounding 4Published on the Department’s website— http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_123459. The NHS data are from the “NHS trust and PCT combined reference cost schedules”. The independent data are from “Non NHS provider schedules”. The following HRGs have been included—MA17C, MA17D, MA18D, MA19B AND MA20Z. 5Not all spontaneous abortions are included (HRG MB08Z) 6England data 7The 2010-11 Combined Daycase/Elective and Non-Elective Tariffs have been used. |