How to Measure the Cost of Psychiatric Care?

Overview

Economic aspects of psychiatric care system represent of course very important part of psychiatricconceptions within the medical system, including the Czech conception. One of the signs, which might beidentifi ed at the present medical systems, is the signifi cant growth of cost necessary to cure patients.Studies in the Czech Republic, which concern economic aspects of psychiatric care, are ratherexceptional and therefore we tried to propose the method for allocation and calculation of averagecost for psychiatric care in the Czech Republic.At the beginning, it is necessary to decide which cost we want to include into the calculation ofprice for the cure provided. In general, three points of view might be used: „management view“,„accounting view“, „economic view“.On the basis of the decision which view will have the greatest benefi t for us, the procedure will becarried out in the following steps. It might be possible that there will be certain modifi cations in thesteps according to the selected approach.We divided the methodology of calculation of unit cost to fi ve basic steps in order to be comprehensive:identifi cation of cost, determination of the type of service, allocation of the overhead cost, allocationof outputs to particular cost centres, calculation of unit cost.

Key words:
psychiatric cost, explicit cost, implicit cost, algorithm of calculation of cost, price ofservices