Costs of nursing procedures/interventions: an integrative literature review

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.