PECUNIA Reference Unit Cost Templates (PECUNIA RUC Templates)
Creators
Description
The PECUNIA Reference Unit Cost Templates (PECUNIA RUC Templates) are a Microsoft Excel©-based set of tools that enable researchers to calculate unit costs comparable across countries and sectors (so called Reference Unit Costs (RUCs)) using standardized and scientifically validated methods. The templates cover all essential steps from collecting data to calculating the RUCs, e.g. the monetary value of an average service per unit of analysis (e.g. per contact, per day), as well as adjusting for inflation and conversion of currencies. They are consistent with the harmonised PECUNIA Costing Concept (PECUNIA Care Atom, PECUNIA Service Lists, PECUNIA Coding System) and therefore with other PECUNIA Costing Tools (PECUNIA RUC Compendium, PECUNIA RUM Instrument) to achieve comparability by referring to content rather than linguistic equivalence of services and other resource items.
In total, there are six PECUNIA RUC Templates designed for developing RUCs in different sectors in any country affected by the (spill-over) effects of health interventions:
- three templates for RUC calculation of services (SERVICE-1 top-down micro-costing template, SERVICE-2 top-down gross-costing template, SERVICE-2 short form top-down gross-costing template),
- one template for RUC calculation for tangible consequences (TANGIBLE CONSEQUENCES template),
- one template for RUC calculation for productivity changes (PRODUCTIVITY LOSS template), and
- one template for RUC calculation for personal time spent (PERSONAL TIME template).
Five out of the six templates also contain additional data collection sheets for data inputs either from published national data or primary data collected specifically for developing the unit cost (‘SERVICE-1 data collection sheet’, ‘SERVICE-2 data collection sheet’, ‘SERVICE-2 short data collection sheet’, TANGIBLE CONSEQUENCES data collection sheet’ and ‘PRODUCTIVITY LOSS data collection sheet’).
Separate RAW (RUC Aggregation/Weighting) data sheets for all resource use types (SERVICE, TANGIBLE CONSEQUENCES, PRODUCTIVITY LOSS, PERSONAL TIME) are available for the harmonised aggregation of multiple unit cost estimate from different datasources into one overall RUC, and for sharing newly calculated RUCs with the PECUNIA Consortium.