Page 176 - Timeliness of Infectious Disease Notification & Response Systems - Corien Swaan

174 Chapter 8
a Wages are increased by 44% to account for overhead costs, depreciation, and housing costs b Extrapolated to all organisations, i.e., 80 peripheral hospitals and 8 academic hospi-
tals, and 14 admissions of suspected cases.
c None of the admitted suspected patients was diagnosed with EVD; hospital admittance averaged 3 days.
Virological laboratory
Department of Virology staff at Erasmus Medical Center advised on the EVD preparations for admission of a suspected EVD case at Erasmus; guided other laboratories through the diagnostics of suspected cases, and assisted with the EVD patient brought from Africa to MIH. Since the Erasmus laboratory staff was already thoroughly trained in handling extremely hazardous infectious agents, they needed only regular updates on EVD developments worldwide and more specifically in the Netherlands. Mean total costs for deployment of personnel and diagnostics were estimated at €0.25 million (UI: €0.23 million-€0.27 mil- lion) (Appendix File Table A7).
MHS
The mean number of hours spent on EVD preparedness and response at one MHS was estimated at 1,131 hours, or €0.49 million (Appendix File Table A8). Extrapolated to all 25 MHSs, this finding would lead to total average costs of €1.23 million (UI: €0.45 million-€3.11 million).
RIVM
At the RIVM, 28 persons spent 4,385 hours on EVD preparedness and response, resulting in total costs of €0.23 million (Appendix File Table A8). Activities includ- ed advice to the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, organisation of expert meetings, development of guidelines, media activities, consultations regarding possible EVD cases, information on the website, e-mail communications, and a telephone line especially set up for questions regarding EVD.
Total costs
The mean total costs for the Dutch health system were €12.6 million (UI: €6.7 million-22.5 million), see Table 3. Taking overhead costs into account, total costs averaged €17.9 million (UI: €9.4 million-€32.6 million). For ambulance services and academic hospitals, we distinguished costs for preparedness and response. Costs for preparedness were highest. The costs of response activities of am- bulance services (transportations of suspected EVD cases) were 0.94% (range 1.29-0.72%) of total EVD-related ambulance care costs. The costs of response