The presence of a urinary catheter is an important predictor of in-hospital mortality in internal medicine patients

Rationale and Objective: Mortality rates are used to assess the quality of hospital care after appropriate adjustment for case-mix. Urinary catheters are frequent in hospitalized adults and might be a marker of patient frailty and illness severity. However, we know of no attempts to estimate the predictive value of indwelling catheters for specific patient outcomes. The objective of the present study was to (a) identify the variables associated with the presence of a urinary catheter and (b) determine whether it predicts in-hospital mortality after adjustment for these variables. Methods: The study population included all acutely admitted adult patients in 2020 (exploratory cohort) and January–October 2021 (validation cohort) to internal medicine, cardiology and intensive care departments at the Laniado Hospital, a regional hospital with 400 beds in Israel. There were no exclusion criteria. The predictor variables were the presence of a urinary catheter on admission, age, gender, comorbidities and admission laboratory test results. We used bivariate and multivariate logistic regression to test the associations between the presence of a urinary catheter and mortality after adjustment for the remaining independent variables on admission. Results: The presence of a urinary catheter was associated with other independent variables. In 2020, the odds of in-hospital mortality in patients with a urinary catheter before and after adjustment for the remaining predictors were 14.3 (11.6–17.7) and 6.05 (4.78–7.65), respectively. Adding the presence of a urinary catheter to the prediction logistic regression model increased its c-statistic from 0.887 (0.880–0.894) to 0.907 (0.901–0.913). The results of the validation cohort reduplicated those of the exploratory cohort. Conclusions: The presence of a urinary catheter on admission is an important and independent predictor of in-hospital mortality in acutely hospitalized adults in internal medicine departments.