41 Mr. Leonard asked the Minister for Health the average patient cost per day in acute hospitals in each health board area. [23419/96]

Limerick East): My Department is continuing to develop mechanisms for attributing acute hospital costs to the different elements of a hospital's activity. This information is available for 26 of the biggest hospitals, and the average in-patient cost per bed-day has been extracted from the cost and activity information supplied by those hospitals and is set out for 1994 in Table 1, this is the latest year for which figures are available. Figures for 1995 will be available in 1997. These figures exclude costs and activity attributable to day cases, outpatient services, long stay cases, dialysis, obstetrics and psychiatry. They do not take account of capital costs. There are many factors which affect in-patient cost per bed-day and these include, in particular, casemix workload and teaching obligations.