Healthcare-Associated Infections and Economic Impact

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) represent infections acquired by patients during the course of receiving treatment in healthcare settings. These infections encompass surgical-site infections, catheter-associated urinary tract infections, central-line-associated bloodstream infections and ventilator-associated pneumonia, among others. Globally, HAIs affect an estimated 5–15 per cent of hospitalised patients in high-income countries and even higher proportions in low- and middle-income regions. Beyond the human toll of morbidity and mortality, HAIs impose a substantial economic burden through prolonged hospital stays, additional diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, and increased use of high-cost antimicrobials. Annual direct medical costs attributable to HAIs run into billions of dollars or pounds in many health systems, while indirect costs such as lost productivity and societal impacts further amplify the financial burden. The rise of antimicrobial resistance within HAI pathogens exacerbates these costs through treatment failures and the need for more expensive or toxic drug regimens. Effective infection prevention and control programmes, combined with robust surveillance and antimicrobial stewardship, are central to mitigating both the clinical and economic consequences of HAIs. Ongoing research seeks to quantify these burdens more accurately, inform resource allocation and evaluate the cost-effectiveness of intervention strategies at national and local levels.

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Healthcare-Associated Infections and Economic Impact publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in healthcare-associated infections and economic impact across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Healthcare-associated infection (HAI): Infection acquired by a patient while receiving care in a healthcare setting.

Length of stay (LOS): Duration of a patient’s hospital admission, often used to gauge resource utilisation.

Analogy costing framework: Economic modelling method that estimates attributable costs by analogy to similar healthcare expenditures.

Multistate model: Statistical approach that accounts for time-dependent events (such as infection onset) and competing risks (discharge or death) when estimating outcomes like LOS.

References

1. Measuring the Direct Medical Costs of Hospital-Onset Infections Using an Analogy Costing Framework. PharmacoEconomics (2024).
2. Impact of healthcare-associated infection on length of stay. Journal of Hospital Infection (2021).
3. Impact of multi-drug resistant bacteria on economic and clinical outcomes of healthcare-associated infections in adults: Systematic review and meta-analysis. PLOS ONE (2020).
4. Clinical and economic burden of healthcare-associated infections: A prospective cohort study. PLOS ONE (2023).