Avaliação de custos associados à infeção do local cirúrgico nos serviços de cirurgia geral do Hospital Geral Santo António

Abstract

The economic costs related to infections, can increase the average length of hospital stay, antibiotics use and other drugs, the use of more laboratory and other diagnostic methods in addition to the social and intangible costs. This study aimed to make a cost analyses, attributable to surgical site infections (SSI) during the year 2009 in general surgery services at the Hospital Geral de Santo Antonio, a unit of the Centro Hospitalar do Porto (CHP). The studied population corresponded to the total number of surgical procedures performed, reported to the infection control committee at discharge: a total of 1280 episodes, which represent 44.2% of all discharged patients. A retrospective case-control study was performed in order to answer the following questions:  How many cases of SSI were identified?  Which are the associated costs of antibiotics use and length of stay, comparing SSI cases and controls?  What is the cost of the SSI in general surgery services of the CHP? We identified 37 cases (patients with SSI), which correspond to 2.9% from a total of 1280 patients studied. The controls in equal numbers were extracted from the remaining population, paired by surgical procedure, ASA class and age. The average age of the group of cases and population controls was 63, 62 and 56 years of age, respectively. SSI was classified as superficial in 25 of the 37 identified corresponding to 67.6%. Urgent surgery occurred in 57% of cases. The surgical wound was classified as contaminated and / or tarnished in 54% of cases. The present study examined the use of antibiotics based on information provided by the Office of Information Systems and the final cost calculation was carried out by length of stay in days (from the day of surgery until the day of discharge). The cost per day was provided by the Information Office for the Management. The calculation was made for each patient in the respective service, and then calculated the average costs associated costs with the ILC study. The end result was € 3 323 The knowledge of the infections treatment costs enables administrators to weigh the cost / benefit and justify investment in the prevention especially when there are studies showing that a percentage of these infections are preventable.

Date of Award	Dec 2011
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Carlos Vasconcelos (Supervisor) & António Polónia (Co-Supervisor)