Gunshot victims cost KPH $80 million since the start of the year
DR ANN Jackson-Gibson painted a stark picture of patients who have been waiting to have elective surgery but have had to give way to emergencies occasioned by violent incidents.
“When you extrapolate that to the number of admissions, you are talking about almost 200 ICU admission days. When medical care such as room and board, salaries, ventilators, among other pieces of equipment, is itemised, it is looking more like $400,000 per day,” Jackson-Gibson said.
“When you multiply that, you are talking about the hospital spending and taking resources out of the system to the tune of $80 million from the start of the year,” the medical practitioner noted, adding that this was just KPH alone, with the medical costs incurred as a result of gunshot wounds at other hospitals not taken into account.
She bemoaned that “our money is going into a sinking fund, and the people who really need it – the cancer patient who comes in with cancer of the womb is telling me she has to go to chemotherapy without removing the womb because the resources are spent on emergencies.”
“This is the reality, and this is what we have to deal with on a daily basis,” she said.
Jackson-Gibson also highlighted that in 2016, there were 724 victims of gun violence who were treated in accident and emergency. Another 207 persons were dead on arrival at KPH owing to gunshot wounds.
NUMEROUS STABBINGS
The number for stabbing incidents was also glaring, with 335 victims of stab wounds, while another 21 were pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.
The 2016 data for KPH excluded information for the month of July.
Jackson-Gibson said that 1,059 persons were admitted for treatment at the hospital in 2016 for both gunshot and stab wounds.
“So you had 1,059 persons that are occupying beds on the wards that we need to put elective cases in, and a lot of these people go into the operating theatre.
“And this is something that we have to do at all the public hospitals across the island because Cornwall Regional and all of them are completely inundated from the impact of this ongoing burden.”