Costing of health services in Kayunga hospital during financial year 2016/2017

Abstract

Every six seconds, one person dies from diabetes. This makes the diabetes diseases the biggest cause of death than HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. Contemporary studies have further indicated that the diabetes disease affects 415 million people around the world. This is estimated to shoot up to 642 million people by the year 2040. Out of 193 million people who are not yet diagnosed with diabetes, 90% live in the Sub Saharan Africa where national governments are still grumbling with shrinking resources and increasing demands for quality and equitable health services. To counter balance increasing prevalence, new incidences and ever increasing cost of health care services, this study was conducted to understand the average cost of treating a diabetic patient as well as the total cost that was incurred to run Kayunga hospital during the Financial Year 2016/2017. Methodology This study was guided by the Step down costing method by Sheppard et al.1998. This methodology was purposevely selected because of its simplicity in arriving at a unit cost of providing a hospital service of interest. Step down costing method identifies a range of resources needed to run the hospital, and then assigns these resources to cost centers on an allocation basis. These costs in turn filter down until the unit cost in final cost centers of interest is established as opposed to the other costing approaches which ignore the indirect costs. Results This study was able to reveal that during the financial year 2016/2017 Kayunga hospital spent a total of 3,818,152,368 Uganda shillings (998,993.3 US Dollars). The biggest hospital expenditure was spent on human resources 1,659,247,877 (434,130.8 US Dollars). This accounted for 43% of the total hospital expenditure. The average cost of treating a Diabetic patient was Ugx 46,043.21 (12 US Dollars).This was more than twice as much the cost of an ordinary OPD visit. The diabetic clinic had the second lowest percentage (2.2%) share among the hospital final costing centers and the recurrent cost of managing a diabetic patient stood at Ugx.66, 059,837 (17,284.1 US Dollars). Conclusions Diabetes mellitus disease is no longer a disease of only industrialized nations. National Governments of low and middle income states should work to intensify health education to trickle down the increasing trends of Diabetes. Similarly, governments should endeavor to make use of disease specific costing as a means of informing evidence based programming that is capable of yielding equitable and high quality health care services to all. The costing information revealed that the cost of treating DM at OPD is twice more than that of ordinary OPD consultation.