Trudy Simpson, Staff Reporter
THE PATIENT spending the most days in the intensive care unit (ICU) at the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) in 2003 was a case of domestic violence. The patient was so badly injured that she stayed 87 days in ICU and a further 128 days on the hospital ward.
The average cost to keep her there was about $40,000 per day (almost $5 million) and only a fraction of that bill was repaid. This is not an unusual case.
Dr. Elizabeth Ward, director of disease prevention and control at the Health Ministry, pointed out that it cost the health services $1.3 billion to treat injuries last year, $743 million of which was used to treat violence - related injuries.
Dr. Ward said doctors deal routinely with emergency patients who are brought in for preventable violence-related injuries. Many of these patients cannot afford to repay the full cost of treatment, she said.
"This is just eating away at the budget for operating costs. We could take that money and pay off monies owed for our receivables, to pay for supplies, reagents, tests," she said.
The Ministry of Health owes suppliers $760 million. "Injuries use up a lot of supplies - blood, gauze and other disposables. It also interrupts the workflow. One study said that one in three elective surgeries are cancelled," Dr. Ward said.
In the UHWI's case "over an 18-month period from December 2003 to May 2004 injured patients were charged about $24 million but only about $5 million was recovered by the hospital," said Prof. Archie McDonald, professor of surgery in the department of surgery at UHWI.
He said that treating injured patients last year accounted for about 14 per cent of the total recurrent budget for the hospital. Data from the UHWI showed that the most frequent cause of the more than 3,000 injuries which came to the hospital between between January 1, 1998 and December 2000 was assault.
"Seventy per cent of patients were less than 40 years old. The male to female ratio was 3 to 1," Prof. McDonald said.
Speaking on the same issue last year, Dr. Trevor McCartney, the Kingston Public Hospital's (KPH) senior medical officer, said 48 per cent of the hospital's pharmaceutical budget goes toward violence-related treatment and much of this money was unrecoverable as 63 per cent of patients who visited the KPH were unemployed.
In the South East health region, where both hospitals fall, only 25 per cent of the revenues spent are recovered, said Nigel Logan, the Health Ministry's principal finance officer.
