NCEPOD report: Community-acquired pneumonia (14 December 2023)

Summary

This National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD) report highlights the care provided to adults presenting to hospital with a diagnosis of community-acquired pneumonia and gives recommendations.

Content

Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is one of the most common infectious diseases seen in clinical practice. It results in many hospital admissions and has a high mortality, primarily as the patient group is often frail and older with multimorbidity. The diagnosis of CAP is not always apparent at the time of first clinical assessment, and in many hospitals, there is no specialist team that takes overall responsibility for the care of patients with CAP. Clinical teams need to be more accurate in making the diagnosis of CAP, assessing its severity and ensuring appropriate antibiotic therapy. Local leadership is key in developing an infrastructure to ensure the care of patients with pneumonia is organised appropriately and a programme of ongoing monitoring and improvement is introduced.

In this study, the quality of care provided to patients aged 18 years and over, who had a diagnosis of CAP during the sampling period of 1st October 2021 to 31st December 2021, was assessed by analysing data from 767 clinician questionnaires, 149 organisational questionnaires and the output from the peer review of 401 sets of case notes.