Costs were not discounted. Quantities in the form of bed-days were reported separately from the costs. The average price of a bed-day was used to derive costs. This figure included nursing and medicine staff, costs for medicine, food, diagnostic procedures and rent for buildings and machinery, and the costs for out-patient visits. The number of bed-days per individual patient was known and multiplied by this average cost per bed-day. Only health service costs were used.
The source of the cost data was the main hospital of the county which had calculated yearly the price of a bed per day for its various departments during the period 1981-86. This price included all the costs mentioned above plus follow-up after treatment. For the other hospitals in the county, either a specific price per bed-day for the hospital (but not for the various departments) or a price per bed-day based on the number of beds and physicians in the departments, as compared to the hospital as a whole, were used. For the period 1973-78 information on costs was not available; the prices for the 1981-86 period were used to estimate the price of a bed-day in the earlier period. The quantity data (i.e. the number of bed-days) were available for each individual patient from the local cancer registry. Costs were reflated to 1992 prices using the consumer price index.