<b>ต้นทุนการดูแลและให้การศึกษาเด็กพิการในมุมมองภาครัฐและครอบครัว</b><br>The Cost of Caring for and Educating Children with Disability: The Government and Care Giver Perspectives

บทคัดย่อ

The objective of this study is to estimate
treatment cost of disabled children who took a course
at Special Education Center Region 7 (SECR7),
Phitsanulok, Thailand. We also studied the economic
impact on care givers of disabled children. The
disabled students were categorized into 2 groups:
physical disability and neurological disability. The
cost of illness approach was employed as the scope of
this study. To estimate the treatment cost, we applied
the activity based costing technique using secondary
data from the SECR7 office in fiscal year 2012. We
identified activities basing on provided document and
additional information from interviews. Every activity
had to evaluate in 6 parts: material cost, asset
depreciation, properties depreciation, wage,
infrastructure cost and transportation cost for officers’
works by using activity based costing method. In term
of the estimation of economic cost or impact on the
care givers, the primary data was collected. We
interviewed 34 care givers of children who took course
from March 1 to June 30, 2013 at the SECR7. The
economic cost of the care givers occurred either when
children stayed at the SECR7 or when they stayed at
their homes. The opportunity cost of care givers were
estimated as care giver time cost and travel cost. We
adopted the human capital approach for the time cost
estimation. The results from this study were presented
as baht per year. The study found that the total cost of
physical disabled children was 41,220 baht per person
per year, while that of the neurological disability
children was 31,634 baht per person per year. When
only concern on treatment, it was 12,975 baht per
person per year for children having physical disability,
while for children having neurological disabilities, the
treatment was 11,416 baht per person per year. Due
to the higher cost of care givers, the policy makers
should keep this finding when considering government
policy.