Journal article

The economic cost of hospital malnutrition in Europe; a narrative review.

  • Khalatbari-Soltani S Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (IUMSP), Lausanne University Hospital, Biopole 2, Route de la Corniche 10, CH-1010 Lausanne, Switzerland; Department of Internal Medicine, Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), Rue du Bugnon 46, 1011 Lausanne, Switzerland. Electronic address: Saman.KhalatbariSoltani@unil.ch.
  • Marques-Vidal P Department of Internal Medicine, Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), Rue du Bugnon 46, 1011 Lausanne, Switzerland. Electronic address: Pedro-Manuel.Marques-Vidal@chuv.ch.
  • 2017-05-23
Published in:
  • Clinical nutrition ESPEN. - 2015
English BACKGROUND
Malnutrition among hospitalized patients increases length of stay (LOS) and carries extra hospitalization costs.


OBJECTIVE
To review the impact of malnutrition on hospital LOS and costs in Europe.


METHODS
PubMed and Google Scholar search. All articles from January 2004 until November 2014 were identified. Reference lists of relevant articles were also manually searched.


RESULTS
Ten studies on LOS and nine studies on costs were reviewed. The methods used to assess malnutrition and to calculate costs differed considerably between studies. Malnutrition led to an increased LOS ranging from 2.4 to 7.2 days. Among hospitalized patients, malnutrition led to an additional individual cost ranging between 1640 € and 5829 €. At the national level, the costs of malnutrition ranged between 32.8 million € and 1.2 billion €. Expressed as percentage of national health expenditures, the values ranged between 2.1% and 10%.


CONCLUSIONS
In Europe, malnutrition leads to an increase in LOS and in hospital costs, both at the individual and the national level. Standardization of methods and results reported is needed to adequately compare results between countries.
Language
  • English
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/182456
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