Over the 2 year period, the value of CHW time spent making home visits was R91,399, while fuel, vehicle maintenance, and depreciation costs attributable to CHW visits were R37,704, R28,130, and R36,785, respectively.
The same percentage of fuel and maintenance costs attributable to CHW visits was applied to the total vehicle depreciation cost to calculate vehicle depreciation attributable to CHW visits.
Table 2 presents the component costs attributable to CHW visits.
In all, 51% of the total cost of follow-up was attributable to the visits themselves, 39% to the CT scans and 10% to the chest X-rays.
This conservative approach was thought to be attributable to the fact that visiting clinicians were unfamiliar with the patient's baseline state of health and were therefore more cautious.
As program vehicles are used for other purposes, we estimated that 50% of usage was attributable to CHW home visits.
Annual costs for depression in Canada are estimated at over 14.4 billion [ 10], attributable to primary care visits, hospitalization, and medication [ 11].
This was primarily driven by the costs of chemotherapy drugs, although patients receiving chemotherapy also incurred significantly higher costs attributable to district nurse visits and hospital stays.
Since the vehicles were also used for other tasks such as transportation of specimens to laboratories for analysis, only a percentage of the total vehicle costs were truly attributable to the CHW visits.
Because there was uncertainty in a number of parameters used to estimate total cost, we estimated an upper and lower bound for costs, reflecting a combination of differing assumptions regarding salary and percentage of vehicle costs attributable to CHW home visits.
Event-based biosurveillance; text classification; machine learning Determine operational definition of emergency department (ED) visits attributable to asthma for public health surveillance.
