South Africa could be spending up to R200-million a year on treating people with serious abdominal gunshot wounds, researchers say in the latest SA Medical Journal.
Dr Denis Allard, a surgeon at Cape Town’s GF Jooste hospital, and University of Cape Town professor of medicine Dr Vanessa Burch say in a paper that this amount does not include the cost of gunshot injuries to other parts of the body.
They made the estimate on an extrapolation of a study of injuries wounds at the GF Jooste state hospital on the violence-wracked Cape Flats.
They found that over a seven month period, surgeons at the GF Jooste hospital did an average of one emergency laparotomy — surgical entry into the abdominal cavity — a week for firearm injuries.
On average, each of the 21 patients treated at the hospital cost the state health service about R10 269.
This, the researchers said, was 13 times government’s per capita health spending.
”Not only does the firearm-related trauma burden in South Africa exceed national fiscal resources, but it also threatens to exceed human [medical staff] resources,” they warned.
They say the allocation of resources to firearm trauma ”may ultimately compromise the care of non-trauma patients competing for access to the same health care resources”.
They also say these costs raise the question of the need for violence prevention programmes. – Sapa