Economics and Preventing Hospital-Acquired Infection - Broadening the Perspective

We present a hypothetical model of the change in economic costs and health benefits to society that result from nosocomial infection-control programmes. We include values for costs incurred by the hospital sector, community health services and the private costs to patients. We value health benefits with quality adjusted life years. We demonstrate that when infection-control interventions reduce economic costs and increase health benefits they should be adopted without further question. If however, interventions increase economic costs and increase health benefits then the trade-off between cost and benefit should be examined. Decision makers should assess the cost per unit of health benefit from infection-control programmes, consider the impact on health budgets and compare infection-control with alternate uses of scarce health care resources.