Asian Journal of Research in Nursing and Health

Objective: Critically ill patients are those who are dependent on advanced monitoring instruments and therapy for survival because of dysfunction or failure of 1 or more organs/ systems. The care of critically ill patients relies upon the use of skilled personnel and sophisticated equipment with the expenditure of large amounts of time and money. This study aims to investigate the effects of clinical processes, examinations and treatments on cost in inpatients in emergency intensive care units.

Methods: A total of 108 patients with complete records were included in the study. This study was carried out retrospectively with the demographic examination of the intensive care patients hospitalized. The data obtained by the study carried out within the scope of clinical research are statistically nonparametric. For this reason, Kruskal-Wallis H tests were used in the statistical evaluation according to the related categorical (nominal or ordinal) and independent numerical groups, as the case may be.

Results: The average length of stay in the intensive care unit was 5.2 day (min, max) (1.50). As the day of hospitalization increased, the cost of patients increased (p: 0.00). The clinical results and the effect on cost were found to be statistically significant (p=0.001). The effect of MV usage on cost was found to be statistically significant (p=0.002).

Discussion: ICUs are expensive because they require high technology and highly qualified staff. In our study, the average cost was 3947 TL, the average transaction cost was 3126.2 TL and the average cost of medicine was 820.2 TL. According to our study, our intensive care costs were lower compared to intensive care costs of European countries; but the cost of treatment was higher than cost of medicines and consumables according to the other studies. Invasive procedures applied to patients, length of stay in intensive care unit and final results increase the cost.

Conclusion: In intensive care units, the duration of stay and invasive procedures cause high costs. According to the results of our study, it was thought that the Glasgow Coma Scale could be helpful in referring patients to the right intensive care unit in the grade system and could benefit the country and health economics regarding the costs of patients.