Patient-level costing information
The Patient Level Information and Costing Systems (PLICS) collections cover financial year 2024/25 . For further information see the Approved Costing Guidance introduction, the Integrated Collections Guidance and the Ambulance Collections Guidance.
Contents
PLICS integrated collection 2025
PLICS ambulance collection 2025
Overview
The information gathered from this collection will be used to enable NHS England’s Costing Transformation Programme to more effectively perform its pricing and licensing functions under the Health and Social Care Act 2022. It will:
- inform new methods of pricing NHS services
- inform new approaches and other changes to the design of the currencies used to price NHS services
- contribute to NHS England’s strategic objective of a single national cost collection
- inform the relationship between provider characteristics and cost
- help trusts to maximise use of their resources and improve efficiencies, as required by the provider licence
- identify the relationship between patient characteristics and cost
- support an approach to benchmarking for regulatory purposes
- support the NHS’s drive to improve productivity and efficiency.
Scope
This Notice is served on:
- all trusts identified in Annex A Section 2 of the published Requirements Specification for Patient Level Information and Costing Systems (PLICS) Mandatory Collections continued implementation and associated Mandatory Request. These documents are published on the NHS England website. The organisation specified in the above scope are requested to comply with the form.
PLICS integrated collection
The PLICS integrated collection covers patient-level costing data on acute, mental health, Talking Therapies* and community health services from all designated providers.
It contains unit costs for inpatient admissions, emergency care, outpatient attendances, mental health provider spells and care contacts, IAPT appointments and community services care contacts for NHS providers in England.
The dataset for collection in 2025 is in Annex A, Section 1 of the Requirements Specification for Patient Level Information and Costing Systems (PLICS) Mandatory Collections continued implementation, which is relevant to the associated Mandatory Request and the designated providers are as published in Annex A, Section 2.
*Note that NHS Talking Therapies was formerly known as Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) and the data feed on the extract specification that trusts will submit will still be called IAPT for the 2025 National Cost Collection.
PLICS ambulance collection
The Patient Level Information and Costing Systems (PLICS) collection covers patient-level costing data on ambulance services from designated ambulance providers.
It contains activity and financial data for all incidents going through 999 call centres or dispatch centres in England.
The dataset for collection is in Annex A, Section 3 of the Requirements Specification for Patient Level Information and Costing Systems (PLICS) Mandatory Collections continued implementation which is relevant to the associated Mandatory Request and the designated providers are as published in Annex A, Section 4.
Legal basis
In accordance with the Health and Care Act 2022 and the Health and Care Act 2022 (Commencement No. 2 and Transitional and Saving Provision) Regulations 2022, as of 1 July 2022 Monitor (NHS Improvement) is abolished, and all mandatory requests from Monitor (NHS Improvement) are to be treated as a direction by NHS England to NHS Digital under section 254 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012.
The statutory functions of NHS Digital transferred to NHS England under the Health and Social Care Information Centre (Transfer of Functions, Abolition and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2023 (Transfer Regulations) with effect from 1 February 2023 (Transfer Date). Under the Transfer Regulations, all directions by either the Secretary of State or NHS England to NHS Digital are now regarded as if they were directions made by the Secretary of State to NHS England.
Consequently, the legal basis for this collection is still the Mandatory Request (now Direction), with its status now deemed to be a Direction from the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to NHS England under section 254 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012.