Infection of the musculoskeletal (MSK) system is a dreaded complication that seems to be on the rise. Many factors, such as resistant bacteria or poor host factors, may influence such rise. This increase leads to greater resource consumption, especially due to antibiotic (ATB) prescription. Strategies must be created to detect patients at risk and prevent such infections. Hospital administrators should be made aware of the costs and impact of MSK infections in order to understand the need to prevent such complications. Therefore, our goal is to characterize the infected orthopaedic patient and evaluate the cost associated with ATB prescription in such cases. This is a retrospective and descriptive study, based on patient record analysis of all patients treated at our department, from January 2013 to March 2015. We identified 177 patients with a MSK infection and an isolated infectious agent. There was no predominance of either sex. Approximately 50% of patients were aged between 66 and 85 years old. Most frequent agents were MSSA (30,2%) and MRSA (21,8%), followed by Streptococcus species (8,9%) and Pseudomonas aeruginosas (7,1%). Although most patients were infected by a single agent, 18,6% had two or more causative agents isolated in cultures. Of those, 69,7% had either MSSA or MRSA as one of the isolated agents. Most commonly affected area was the hip (39,5%), followed by the knee (23,2%) and ankle (21,5%). Nearly all patients had had prior surgery, with arthroplasty and osteosynthesis as the most common procedures (52,4% and 33,3%, respectively). Infection related admission was responsible for a total of 6.116 hospital bed-days, with the majority of patients staying in hospital for up to 30 days (77,3%). Total cost of hospital ATB administration was 61.365,61€, with approximately 346,7€ spent in each patient. This corresponds to 42,6% of the total cost of medication during hospital stay (144.146,1€ of total cost, with 814,4€ per patient). The typical infected orthopaedic patient is aged 66 to 85 years old, was operated to his hip or knee, and either an arthroplasty or osteosynthesis was performed. Staphylococcus aureus remains the most common agent. MSK infections have significant costs associated with their treatment, and clinical departments should periodically re-evaluate discharged patients in order to understand what groups are at risk of developing such a complication. Only a correct identification of all these factors makes it possible to create a targeted preventive strategy, in order to reduce costs to the institution.
