The Costs of Bacterial Healthcare-associated Infections in Australia

Course Content

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs)  are infections acquired in hospitals or other health care facilities that were not present or incubating at the time of the client’s admission. It consists of those infections that are symptomatic after the discharge of the patient.

HAIs are some of public health’s most significant problems globally, continuing to increase regardless of the hospital’s efforts on infection control measures and are contributing significantly to morbidity, mortality and cost.

HAIs are responsible for increasing morbidity and mortality, increasing antibiotic resistance through the overuse of antibiotics to treat them and pose a high additional cost and burden on healthcare. They affect approximately 7% of all inpatients and result in 16 million deaths each year, making them a silent pandemic.

The cost of caring for patients with HAIs has been compared with the cost of caring for control subjects without HAI who were matched for factors (such as the severity of illness, diagnosis, and co-morbidities) that may confound the measurement of cost. However, a strategy that matches patients requires careful selection of clinical data to establish parity between patients with HAI and control subjects. 

When health care systems must monitor expenditures closely, the demonstration of immediate health benefits or cost savings is often a prerequisite for convincing administrators to support control measures. Hospitals can use this data when evaluating potential cost savings from effective infection-control measures.

The objective of this study was to provide robust estimates of the health burden of five bacterial HAIs and the additional impact of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) using multistate modelling. The researchers conducted a multi-site, retrospective case-cohort of all acute-care hospital admissions with a positive culture of one of the five organisms of interest (Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumonia, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, or Enterococcus faecium). Researchers matched 20,390 cases with bloodstream, urinary, or respiratory tract infections, to 75,635 uninfected control patients.

Learning Outcomes

In this session, you will:

• Focus on the health burden of five bacterial HAIs
• Understand the worldwide impact of HAIs in terms of LOS
• Discuss the impact of AMR
• Learn the impact of HAIs on death rate