Ramón y Cajal Hospital is the reference centre for Madrid-Barajas airport. Passengers at the airport who need medical assistance are brought to this hospital. A percentage of these passengers require psychiatric evaluation and frequently need to stay inward for a certain term.

Calculate the approximate costs derived from the inward stay at the Psychiatry ward of patients referred from Madrid-Barajas airport.

Revise retrospectively clinical histories of inward psychiatric patients referred from Barajas airport in the last 5 years. The Department of Economic management of the hospital has provided the costs of stay at the Psychiatry ward for the year 2007 (395 euros per day). Data is analyzed using the SPSS software 15.0 version.

The average stay of these patients is 13.96 days. Then, the average cost is 5514.2 euros. Extrapolating these data to our sample, we notice that being the reference centre for an international airport supposes an estimated cost of 545.905.8 euros (109181.16 per year) due to inward stay of psychiatric patients.

The psychiatric attention to the airport population represents an economic extra charge that has an impact on the hospital and the National Health System. We only expose the charge derived from inward stay. To obtain a more realistic overall result we should add the costs of the attention at the emergency room to the result above.