Cost of COVID-19 critical care

Dr. Miriam Apiyo; the Director of Case Hospital, said nurses, cleaners, nutritionists going into these wards also need to be paid risk allowance of between Shs 80,000 and Shs 200,000.

Dr. Lukandwa told The Independent that the private health facilities think the government should try to support the private sector.   “We can debate and bash each other, but the truth is that ICU care is very expensive,” he said.

He added: “The only way to deal with this pandemic is to vaccinate the whole population which is eligible.”

Patrick Byamukama, the head of Masindi-Kitara Medical Centre who manages a not-for-profit health facility in mid-western Uganda, told The Independent on July 09 that politicians are missing the point in debates of cost of COVID-19 health care.

“They are complaining but they don’t understand what it takes to provide specialized health care. There is need for the government to invest in health care. They should actually be blaming the government for not subsidizing specialized health care.

“They have misplaced the anger onto people who have invested to save the lives of ordinary Ugandans.”

Byamukama says he recently had a relative admitted in a health facility in Kampala for seven days and the bill went up to Shs49 million.

“I did not complain when the bill came to that much,” he said.

He says his brother had COVID-19 in Hoima but he was saved when a private facility returned his confirmatory PCR results in one day. No government facility can do that at the moment.

“If this brother of mine had gone to a public health facility, I can guarantee that we would have lost him,” he said.

It is still not clear how much it costs to treat critically ill COVID-19 patients in government hospitals. Attempts by The Independent to talk to Mulago National Referral Hospital’s principal administrator, David Nuwamanya, proved futile.

Dr. Michael Mwanga, the medical director of Soroti Regional Referral Hospital in eastern Uganda told The Independent on July 13 that unless a health economist is asked to do the costing of how much it costs the hospital to treat a patient, they do not know.

But, Dr. Ivan Kisuule, the in-charge of Namboole COVID-19 treatment centre told The Independent on July 14 that it is obvious that even if the government is paying to meet the expenses of treating COVID-19 patients in the public facilities, the cost could just be about the same as the one charged by private facilities.

“What the private entrepreneur puts in while constructing their facility is what the government puts into the government facility. So, if the private health facility is billing the patient Shs 3 million, it would probably be the same cost or even more in a government health facility,” he said.

Dr. Freddie Ssengooba, an Associate Professor of Health Economics and Health Systems Management at Makerere University’s School of Public Health told The Independent on July 14 that when one considers the accountability exercise by the Office of the Auditor General to assess the investments that the government has sunk into the 18 regional referral hospitals to operationalize the treatment of COVID-19 patients, the cost could be more than what private health facilities are charging.

“The cost of treatment in public facilities looks free but it might actually be quite expensive,” he said. He said some of the private hospitals do not have the infrastructure, equipment, and consultants found in public hospitals. He told The Independent that the debate about the cost of treatment in private health facilities is uninformed.

“These court cases have come out because some of the people who have ended up in ICUs have always flown to India to access this critical health care,” he said, “Ugandans are now trying to come to terms with these kinds of costs within the country.”

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