The relationship between skill mix and costs of care
There is strong evidence that older patients were associated
with higher costs but these costs begin to fall as
patients become more elderly. For each one year
increase in age, costs per case rose by 13.58% [exp
(0.1273) = 1.1358] and further analysis indicates that
costs begin to fall when individuals reach around 80
years old. Residential services and longer periods of care
were strongly associated with higher costs. Costs for
residential services were almost five times bigger than
those for non-residential services [exp(1.5892) = 4.8998]
while an increase of 1 day in the length of care was
associated with a 2.60% increase in costs [exp(0.0257) =
1.0260). There was evidence that greater numbers of different
types of staff were associated with lower costs
(Table 2). Having an extra category of staff decreased
costs by about 17% [exp(-0.1827 = 0.8330]. The coefficients
on total staff numbers and total staff numbers
squared suggest that cost per case initially increase by
22.46% [exp(0.2026) = 1.2246] as teams grow by a factor
of one individual, but after then begin to fall. Further
analysis indicates that the point at which cost per case
begins to fall is around 12 WTE staff which is 3 WTE
staff members larger than the largest team in the study
as shown in Table 1