Home enteral nutrition (HEN) has always been recognized as a life-saving procedure, but with the ongoing economic crisis influencing health care, its cost-effectiveness has been questioned recently. Objective: The unique reimbursement situation in Poland enabled the otherwise ethically unacceptable, hence unavailable, comparison of the period of no-feeding and the long-term feeding and the subsequent analyses of the clinical value of the latter and its cost-effectiveness.
Background: Home enteral nutrition (HEN) has always been recognized as a life-saving procedure, but with the ongoing economic crisis influencing health care, its cost-effectiveness has been questioned recently. Objective: The unique reimbursement situation in Poland enabled the otherwise ethically unacceptable, hence unavailable, comparison of the period of no-feeding and the long-term feeding and the subsequent analyses of the clinical value of the latter and its cost-effectiveness. Design: The observational multicentre study in the group of 456 HEN patients was performed between January 2007 and July 2013. Two twelve-month periods were compared. During the first one patients were tube fed with home-made diet without monitoring, while during the other the complex HEN was carried out. The latter included tube feeding and complex monitoring by nutrition support team. Number of complications, hospital admissions, length of hospital stay (LOS), biochemical and anthropometric parameters and costs of hospitalization were compared.
Study Type
OBSERVATIONAL
Enrollment
456
Patients with tube feeding with FSMP for at least twelve months
Stanley Dudrick's Memorial Hospital
Skawina, Malopolska, Poland
Number of complications
Time frame: 24 moths
Number of hospital admissions
Time frame: 24 months
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