Comparison of the Cost of Intravenous Anesthesia in Cambodia with that of Inhalation Anesthesia in our Hospital in Japan

For medical support in a developing country, education of the native medical staff, financial aid, and supply of medicines and hospital equipment are all very important. Especially for successful and successive non governmental organization (NGO) activities, restriction of funds is a big problem. After 9 years of NGO activity in Cambodia, we know that intravenous anesthetic drugs are easily obtained in Cambodia while inhalation anesthetic gases are not. Consequently, we have been offering intravenous anesthesia for oral surgery in Cambodia. In this study, we compared the cost of anesthesia in Cambodia with that of our hospital in Japan. Inhalation anesthesia has been widely adopted in Japan, and all our patients were also anesthetized with inhalation anesthesia. As a result, we compared the cost of intravenous anesthesia to that of inhalation anesthesia. The costs were calculated on the Japanese drug cost standard basis. The cost of inhalation anesthesia for each case is almost 8 times higher than that of intravenous anesthesia. Intravenous anesthesia is really cheap compared with that of inhalation anesthesia in Japan and this situation must be more prominent in Cambodia. Because of the easy intravenous drug supply and poor hospital equipment for inhalation anesthesia, including anesthetic machine and the scavenging system for waste gases in Cambodia, we have employed the intravenous anesthesia technique. Our study shows that the adoption of intravenous anesthesia in Cambodia is quite reasonable in terms of education of medical staff, transfer of medical technique and financial background for successful NGO activity.