Indirect Costs of Specialized VA Inpatient Mental Health Treatment Technical rept. no. 6

摘要

This technical report describes the indirect cost of specialized inpatient mental health treatment programs of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). We defined the direct costs of treatment programs as the cost of the staff and supplies used by the treatment program. We surveyed directors of specialized substance use treatment programs and learned the number and type of staff employed. We used salary data from the VA Financial Management System (FMS) to estimate the cost of this staff. The program directors do not have information about other costs associated with treatment, however. These are indirect costs, such as the cost of space, utilities, housekeeping, meals provided to inpatients, the personnel office, supply service, and other hospital administrative costs. This technical report describes how we estimated indirect costs using data from the national extracts of the Decision Support System (DSS). We used data for the 2000-2001 federal fiscal year (FY01).