Impact of specialist ataxia centres on health service resource utilisation and costs across Europe: cross-sectional survey

Table 3 Costs of health care contacts over a one-year period for non-SAC and SAC patients in three European countries

	United Kingdom			Italy			Germany
Health care contacts	Unit cost	Cost non-SAC	Cost SAC	Unit cost	Cost non-SAC	Cost SAC	Unit cost	Cost non-SAC	Cost SAC
Specialist centre visits	197	0	197	25	0	36	170	0	221
General Practitioner visits	42	98	81	25	32	17	29	161	144
Neurologist outpatient visits	197	296	256	25	69	10	65	242	163
Inpatient stays	4280	1284	428	4734	1420	1420	4950	0	1485
Accident & Emergency visits	196	59	59	24	7	2	144	14	86
Physiotherapy visits	65	104	201	20	374	285	38	1274	1055
Speech and Language therapy visits	185	130	56	20	154	126	38	337	435
Occupational Health Therapy visits	120	156	181	20	30	26	38	299	393
Other consultant specialist visits	119	83	355	25	41	48	65	104	104
Total		2209	1813		2126	1971		2431	4087
P-value†			0.55			0.68			0.26
P-value‡			0.59			0.84			0.19

† Test for significant differences in mean costs between non-SAC and SAC groups (unadjusted)
‡ Test for significant differences in mean costs between non-SAC and SAC groups (adjusted for age, sex, number of symptoms and number of comorbidities)
SAC, specialist ataxia centre
All numbers are 2021 €
The numbers in the Cost non-SAC and Cost SAC columns are the unit costs for each type of health care contact multiplied by the number of those contacts in Table 2. We tested for significant differences in mean costs between countries separately for non-SAC and SAC groups (adjusted for age, sex, number of symptoms and number of comorbidities). For the non-SAC group there were no significant differences in mean costs between countries (P-value = 0.95). For the SAC group there were significant differences in mean costs between countries (P-value < 0.01)

ISSN: 1750-1172