[Comprehensive Care Home Unit: reduction of hospital resources during influenza outbreaks]

The Comprehensive Care Home Unit of the General Hospital of Villarrobledo is a unit formed by a geriatrician who sees people in nursing homes to improve their quality of care. The activity of the Unit has been analyzed, mainly with the objective of avoiding referral to the emergency room, avoiding hospital admissions, avoiding hospital readmissions and reducing the number of hospital admission days.

We retrospectively described the clinical activity of the Unit during the influenza outbreak of 2017 and 2018. We selected sociodemographical variables, functional assessment scales (Katz index, Barthel index and the Functional Ambulation Classification), and the Global Deterioration Scale. We registered mortality, type of treatment, oncological patients and patients with supplementary tests. The population was divided into four subgroups: hospital admission avoided, hospital re-admission avoided, referral to the emergency department avoided and reduction of admission days. The demographic characteristics were described, including the mode or mean of the variables. An economic report was made, and an analysis of cost per process according to the subgroups, means of Related Groups for the Diagnosis and degree of dependency measured by the Barthel index.

We selected 112 patients, they had a mean age of 82.2 years, Katz G (34.8%), IB 28.8 (DE 34.9), FAC 0 (63.4%) and GDS 7 (22.3%). The most frequent disease seen was respiratory infection (63.2%), 71.4% received active treatment, 10.7% complementary tests were performed, 17.9% oncological and 17% mortality. Cost analysis: hospital readmission avoided (€ 4,128 per patient) and patients with total disability (BI 0-20, € 3,623 per patient) presented more economic saving. The economic savings were more than € 230,000.

The contribution of the Unit during periods of influenza outbreak is cost saving because of reduced numbers of admissions, numbers of readmissions, days of admission and emergency room visits.