Costing of consumables: use in an intensive care unit

In 1991, the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Middlemore Hospital manually costed the treatment and care of asthmatic patients. This was long-winded and labour-intensive, but provided hard data to support anecdotal beliefs that intensive care patients are more expensive than was currently believed or accepted. It is a known problem that funder and provider organizations see a huge disparity on the funding issue. With additional accurate information on the actual cost of individual patients, which can be grouped into disease categories, funding applications can be backed with accurate, up-to-date quantitative data. After a long preparation time, we are now costing individual patient stays in the ICU. Each individual resource was established, costed and entered into an MS ACCESS computerized database. Schedules have been prepared for updating prices, as these change. The final report available gives a detailed list of resource use within certain categories. Some items proved to be impractical to cost on an individual patient basis, and these have been grouped together, costed, and divided by the number of patient days for the last year, and assigned to each individual patient as an hourly unit cost. Believed to be a world-first, this information now forms the basis for variance reporting and pricing.