The research, conducted at Western Health in Melbourne, examined admissions in three hospitals and found that people aged 65 and over, and with other underlying health issues, were most risk of contracting a diarrhoeal illness requiring hospitalisation at an average cost of $5,600 per patient.
At Western Heath the annual cost was around $2 million dollars but nationally the figure comes in at more than $75 million and is set only to rise in the future because of Australia’s aging population.
The research, to be presented to the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases today, says that while deaths from childhood vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, meningitis and tetanus are dropping, deaths from respiratory infections and diarrheal diseases in the elderly are increasing with a corresponding impact on health budgets.
“The changes in our population—now an ageing population with high rates of multi-morbidity—mean that conditions such as diarrhoea are having a much larger health economic impact than they would have previously had in younger populations,” says lead researcher Dr Belinda Lin from Western Health, Melbourne.
“The health service burden and costs of managing community-acquired diarrhoeal disease in our hospital system are high and likely to continue to increase as our population ages.”
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