Costs of nursing procedures/interventions: an integrative literature review

Gastos de procedimientos/intervenciones de enfermería: revisión integrativa de la literatura

ABSTRACT

Objectives:

to analyze the scientific production of nurses regarding the costs of procedures/interventions performed by nursing professionals.

Methods:

integrative literature review with a sample of 17 primary articles selected from the CINAHL, Scopus, EMBASE databases and the PubMed portal.

Results:

all studies were conducted in hospitals, with quantitative, exploratory-descriptive studies, considering the case study method, with the description of costs method adopted, and the number of Brazilian publications stood out (12; 70.58%). The calculation of direct costs was most common due to the absence/difficulty of accessing information in the studied hospitals. This made it impossible to obtain the indirect costs that would be necessary for the composition of the total cost.

Conclusions:

it was shown that studies about the cost of procedures/interventions are still scarce, often covering only the calculation of direct costs. Nurses need to develop studies on such costs using the same methodology in different contexts of health care.

Descriptors:
Nursing; Nursing Care; Costs with Health Care; Cost and Cost Analysis; Services Direct Costs