Retrospective Study On TCM Clinical Pathway Of Chronic Gastritis

BackgroundChronic Gastritis is a prevalent disease in China with six out of ten people might have the chance to get it. It will seriously affect people's daily life and be a financial burden for the sufferers. So Chronic Gastritis has become an important task for the public health business to deal with. And it will be of a great help to lower the medical financial burden if we can develop a low-price and high-efficiency clinical pathway to cure Chronic Gastritis. In the modern TCM clinical research of Chronic Gastritis, there is not a unified diagnosis standard or a treatment effect evaluation, let along a standard treatment method. And statistic shows that TCM has a good clinical efficacy and good to prevent recrudescence to Chronic Gastritis. In this regards, we should aim at set up an effective and standardized TCM combined treatment clinical pathway.Object ivesTo evaluate the effect of the clinical pathway for Chronic Gastritis of Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and to provide evidences to further improve the pathway.MethodsThe study performed retrospective control study of Chronic Gastritis patients which were hospitalized in Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine corresponding to the periods before (from September 2006 to December 2008:control group) and after (from January 2009 to December 2010:intervention group)the implementation of the clinical pathway. the main outcome measures were:1)mean length of hospital stay; 2)hospitalization costs; 3) improvements in clinical symptom; 4) evaluation of clinical treatment effect; 5)patient satisfaction; 6) gastroscopy implementation status; 7) TCM unique therapy implementation status.ResultIn this research there are 174 control groups and 136 intervention groups (totally 310 groups). There is no significant difference between the control groups and the intervention groups when the patients first were hospitalized. After the treatments, the intervention groups have a significant difference from the control groups in the aspects of mean length of hospital stay, patient satisfaction, gastroscopy implementation status and TCM unique therapy implementation status (P<0.05); The intervention groups have NO significant difference from the control groups in the aspects of hospitalization costs, improvements in clinical symptom and evaluation of clinical treatment effect.ConclusionThe implementation of the clinical pathway has brought in the good effect of shortening the mean length of hospital stay, increasing patient satisfaction, better implementing gastroscopy and better implementing TCM unique therapy. It has no significant effect on lowering hospitalization costs, improving in clinical symptom or evaluating clinical treatment effect. The implementation of the clinical pathway has achieved progress but still requires further improve.