Violence-related injuries costing taxpayers US$11m annually
MONTEGO BAY, St James – It is costing taxpayers US$11.1 million annually to treat violence-related injuries that turn up at the island’s public hospitals.
“The high number of injuries due to violence and the associated cost of hospitalisation is impacting negatively on the ability of the public sector to deliver services,” said Dr Elizabeth Ward, director of disease prevention and control in the Ministry of Health.
“Injuries displace or lead to the cancellation of one in three elective surgical lists at our main hospitals each week,” Ward noted.
She was speaking on Tuesday at the 60th annual conference of the Jamaica Association of Public Health Inspectors in Montego Bay.
In addition to treating gunshot and knife wounds, hospital staff are also kept busy treating injuries resulting from motor vehicular accidents, which also eat up a huge chunk of the hospitals’ budget.
Police Commissioner Lucius Thomas, who also addressed the gathering, noted that the police had no breathalysers and were therefore unable to test motorists they believe may have been driving under the influence of alcohol.
“While the number of road users killed in traffic accidents has been trending down, moving from 408 in 2002 to 326 last year, the traffic management arm of the police force has been reporting a disturbing trend,” he said.
“Since the start of this year, there were 24 fatal accidents in which two or more persons have been killed,” he noted, adding that in some cases as many as six people were killed in a single accident.
“A significant proportion of these accidents involve drivers who are either coming from a wake or a funeral. Although we do not have any empirical evidence, since all of the force’s breathalysers are in disrepair, we strongly believe that many of these drivers were either intoxicated or under the influence of drugs,” he added.