In 2006 the total cost of the NHS Hospital Emergency Number Standardisation Project was £755K (see here) which equates with A$1.358M. Taking in to account inflation this equates to A$1.82M.
The cost estimate of the Australian Standardisation of the Hospital Emergency Number (ASHEN) project for reasons discussed below is a fraction of this at A$250K.
The rough breakdown of this cost:
- $150K for ASHEN website implementation and continual data entry. The timeline for website creation is 3 months from date of commencement which will start when part of the funding is provided.
- $50K for video advert creation and media campaign
- $30K for clerical work
- $10K for telecommunications coordination
- $10K for sticker design, creation and distribution
This does not include the technical conversion cost at each individual facility which Joe Vogelgesang has estimated at $1000 per institution.
Our aim is to obtain as much/all of these costs through government grants, charity and private funding.
Funds obtained and their allocation will be transparently displayed on the ASHEN website.
The ASHEN project will be completed at a fraction of the cost of standardisation in Britain for the following reasons:
- Britain has already set a precedent and provided excellent resources discussing why and how standardisation was achieved. We do not need to obtain funding to repeat this exercise.
- We have access to excellent collaborative software (like BaseCamp) which was not readily available in 2006 allowing continuous project discussions to take place without the need to organise physical meetings.
- We have already performed (and continue with) an extensive survey of Australian Hospital Emergency Numbers. This survey was able to be performed at no cost through crowd sourcing of information on social media platforms. This is something which Britain in 2004-2006 would not have been able to do.
- The vehicle we create in Australia will be able to utilise social media platforms and crowd sourcing to help deliver standardisation. Again this is something which could not have been performed in 2004-2006. The bulk of our costs will be directed towards making this vehicle as user friendly, interactive and enjoyable as possible.