Epidemiological characterization and the impact of healthcare-associated pneumonia in patients admitted in a northern Portuguese hospital

Pneumonia is one of the main causes of hospitalization and mortality. It’s the fourth leading cause of death worldwide. Healthcare-associated infections are the most frequent complication of healthcare and affect hundreds of millions of patients around the world, although the actual number of patients affected is unknown due to the difficulty of reliable data. The main goal of this manuscript is to describe the epidemiological characteristics of patients admitted with pneumonia and the impact of healthcare-associated pneumonia (HCAP) in those patients. It is a quantitative descriptive study with retrospective analysis of the clinical processes of 2436 individuals for 1 year (2018) with the diagnosis of pneumonia. The individuals with ≤5 years old represented 10.4% (n = 253) and ≥65 were 72.6% (n = 1769). 369 cases resulted in death, which gives a sample lethality rate of 15.2%. The severity and mortality index were not sensitive to the death event. We found 30.2% (n = 735) individuals with HCAP and 0.41% (n = 59) with ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). In only 59 individuals (2.4%) the agent causing pneumonia was isolated. The high fatality rate obtained shows that pneumonia is a major cause of death in vulnerable populations. Moreover, HCAP is one of the main causes of hospital admissions from pneumonia and death and the most pneumonias are treated empirically. Knowledge of the epidemiology characterization of pneumonia, especially associated with healthcare, is essential to increase the skills of health professionals for the prevention and efficient treatment of pneumonia.