[The profit of the anesthetic work in Tsukuba Medical Center Hospital]

Recently, it has been reported that many hospitals in Japan are facing financial difficulties. In order to study profit and loss of anesthetic work, we calculated costs and fees of 78 anesthetic cases experienced in Tsukuba Medical Center hospital in April, 1993, using our original formula. We compared the profit per hour among 4 groups; the local anesthesia with subcutaneous injection, the general anesthesia alone, the general anesthesia with epidural anesthesia or brachial plexus block, and the epidural and/or spinal anesthesia. Furthermore we compared elective cases with emergency surgery in each group. The profits of the anesthetic work were about -120000 yen for a month. There were two factors which influenced the profits of the hospital, one was whether we selected the general anesthesia or not, and the other was the length of the anesthetic time. The loss in the emergency surgery with the epidural and/or spinal anesthesia was greater than the elective surgery with the same anesthesia. However, in the other anesthesia groups, there were no differences between elective and emergency surgery.