To be honest I’m a bit fed up with quoting the £4000 per CDI case that was calculated by Mark Wilcox and colleagues back in 19 0 plonk (1996 to be exact) and so I was quite excited to stumble across a new estimate from Merseyside whilst browsing ‘Value in Health‘, one of my usual reads. Well, possibly not.. although perhaps it should be – and it does support open access.

Nakamura and colleagues presented an abstract at the 18th International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) meeting and have calculated the mean extra cost of a patient with CDI to be £10,956.82, although as the authors point out, how much of this is attributable to the extra cost of CDI rather than the multiple co-morbidities that likely contributed to the infection leading to the antibiotic treatment, which led to the CDI continues to elude us. The authors are continuing to work on this and I await their final findings with interest, however for now I’ll settle for £11,000 per case as opposed to the 1996 figure of £4000 (data collected in 1995) and is probably more realistic than just allowing for inflation that has averaged at 2.8% pa, which would have made it £6868. As we know (well all of us apart from the Treasury), health inflation is way ahead of normal financial indicators.