My Department's casemix programme collects information in relation to both hospital activity, and it's associated costs. Activity data is collected under the national HIPE programme which operates in 61 public hospitals at present. Costs data are collected under the specialty costs programme in 31 of those 61 hospitals.
Casemix, which involves the monitoring and comparison of costs and activity between hospitals, classifies patients into discreet classes or groups, which share common clinical attributes and similar patterns of resource use. The system presently in use in Ireland categorises activity into 495 diagnosis related groups.
Information in relation to private hospitals is not collected by my Department. Work on clearly identifying private patients in public hospitals is under way at present. It is hoped that a more complete and accurate dataset will be available when the 1999 data are reviewed.
The HIPE programme collects and codes in-patient and day case activity data only, and this is coded under the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9), which allows data to be classified into approximately 12,000 diagnosis and 8,000 procedures.
Production of data on 8,000 separate procedures would not be practicable. However, for the 694,071 cases treated as inpatients and day cases in 1998, the latest date for which audited data are available, in hospitals in which the HIPE programme operated, a total of 519,547 primary procedures were carried out.
The classification of a procedure as being either major or minor is not dealt with under the present classification system. Neither does it classify patients as elective, but rather by their medical status on admission, for example, different types of emergency, transfers from other hospitals, etc.
In 1998 the average length-of-stay was 6.75 days per in-patient case, and the average cost was £1,559 per case.
The waiting time for elective admissions to hospitals is not collected by my Department, apart from waiting list initiative procedures. The number of consultants employed in all public hospitals, funded by my Department, was 1,328 wte's at 31 December 1998, and the number of NCHD's was 2,980.