Hospitalization costs of adult community-acquired pneumonia in England.

Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a disease that is most commonly caused in England by the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae, which infects patients outside of a hospital. Patients who suffer from CAP often require hospitalization, which incurs a cost to the UK National Health Service (NHS). The goal of this study was to establish the annual cost of hospitalized CAP.The researchers used England's national healthcare database, known as Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES), to select all adults in England who were hospitalized for CAP in 2019. For the 187,251 patients hospitalized, an average cost of £3,904 per person was estimated, amounting to a total cost of £731 million per year to the NHS. Most people admitted to hospital with CAP were at risk for the disease (due to factors such as increased age or presence of another disease) and the cost of treatment for this subgroup was disproportionately larger than that for treatment of patients not at risk. Furthermore, while approximately 5% of patients admitted for CAP received critical care during treatment, the average cost for these patients was over £8,000 higher than for those outside this subsection.The costs of hospitalization reported in this analysis were higher than previously estimated. The researchers highlighted weaknesses in other studies and limitations of the current study which could explain the difference. This work provides up-to-date figures for the cost of treating CAP in hospital in England. Public health decision-makers can use these estimates to determine the cost-benefit of vaccines that can help protect against important causes of CAP, particularly vaccines that target S. pneumoniae.