Nosocomial infections cost four times more than prevention and control, says study
The cost of hospital-acquired infections seems to be more than four times higher than the budget spent on preventing them, according to a study carried out in 28 community hospitals in the south eastern US.
The 28 hospitals each had between 30 and 616 beds and were part of the Duke Infection Control Outreach Network (DICON) for surveillance of nosocomial infections.
Deverick Anderson from Duke University in Durham, South Carolina, and colleagues reviewed literature published since 1985 to estimate the costs linked to different kinds of nosocomial diseases (ventilator-associated pneumonia, septicaemia, surgical site infection, catheter-associated urinary tract infection). They used these data to find the cost of hospital-acquired infections in the 28 hospitals in 2004.
The total cost was more than US$26m (€18.9m), while the budget for infection control and prevention was a median $129,000 (€93,000) per hospital. The medial annual cost of hospital-acquired diseases per hospital was thus 4.6 times higher than the amount budgeted for infection control.
An annual 25% reduction in these infections could mean savings of $148,667 (€107,891) per hospital, which would represent a total of $6.5m (€4.7m) for the 28 hospitals, the study claimed.