What is it about?
Clostridium difficile (now Clostridioides difficile) causes diarrhoea and colitis, mainly in hospitalised patients who have received antibiotics. We compared patients with this infection with matched uninfected patients in hospitals in Spain and Italy to measure how much longer infected patients stayed in hospital and how much this cost. C. difficile infection prolonged hospital stay by about 8 to 19 days in adults and 5 days in children, with larger increases in Italian adults, translating into substantial extra costs per patient, especially for recurrences and older patients.
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Photo by Martha Dominguez de Gouveia on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Robust European data on the economic burden of C. difficile infection were scarce. Showing how many extra hospital days and costs each infection generates helps hospitals and health authorities justify investments in prevention, antimicrobial stewardship and more effective treatments.
Perspectives
C. difficile has been one of the main threads of my research since the beginning of my career. This study taught me that numbers on costs and bed-days speak loudly to hospital managers, and can become a powerful ally for infection prevention.
Professor Stefano Di Bella
Universita degli Studi di Trieste
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The impact of Clostridium difficile infection on resource use and costs in hospitals in Spain and Italy: a matched cohort study, International Journal of Infectious Diseases, July 2015, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijid.2015.05.013.
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