Estimating the Costs of Services Provided by Health House and Health Centers in Shahroud

Calculating cost is an important management tool for programming, control, supervision and evaluation of health services in order that informed decisions can be done. This study was done to determine the cost of services provided by health centers, and health house in Shahroud in 2009. In this study, all health centers in urban and rural regions were studied. 70 forms for provided services, public and specific materials used for each service, medicine and equipment, time required for each service and activities, buildings and equipment depreciation costs were used to collect the data. Then the costs of each unit including direct and indirect costs (overhead), as well as the costs of one center and one health care home were calculated through cost analysis software. Findings from data analysis showed that 44.4% of health care providers were male and 55.6% were female. 22.8% of the personnel were working in health house, 26.1% in rural health centers, 9.1% in urban health centers, health centers 24.5% in urban boarding health centers, 2.6% in health care posts and 14.9% were working in Healthcare Department. The highest cost were personnel costs (66.1%) followed by central department costs (12.8%). Next were the costs for drug consumption with 11.0% and specific use with 3.8%. The highest cost was also for training healthcare providers (1325209 RLS) and lowest cost was for sampling of influenza (3872 RLS). Due to high personnel costs, increasing of productivity will play an important role in reducing labor costs. Also, moderating workforce and the using private sector participation in services and outsourcing costly units can play an important role in optimum utilization of resources.