Improving the Blood Culture Collection Process in an Emergency Department
Mr Dale Pogson1
1Darling Downs Health, Kingaroy, Australia
Background: Clinicians rely on the expertise of Infectious diseases (ID) physicians and Pathologists when reviewing and investigating positive Blood cultures. ID physicians and pathologists in turn rely on quality data to identify contaminants vs. true pathogens and guide antimicrobial treatment. Standards for blood culture collection within our Emergency Department are:
- A minimum of two sets of blood cultures must be collected per patient.
- Separate sites must be used for each subsequent set collected.
- Documentation of date, time, site, and indication required for each set.
- Separate pathology request forms are required for each set.
Compliance to collection standards within the Emergency Department were 48.6%, 46.9%. 34.3% and 8.6% respective to the each of the standards.
Action: This project used a before–after design. It was conducted by Infection Prevention staff in a rural Emergency Department where approximately 50 blood Cultures are collected per month. Based on a literature review a corrective intervention was implemented including theoretical education, weekly departmental reports, a social media campaign and an individual feedback routine.
Results: Interim results (the project is ongoing) show an improvement in protocol compliance of 4.3%, 15.5%, 39.2% and 35.5% respective to the each of the standards.
Conclusions: By offering theoretical education, campaigning on social media, providing departmental reports and individualised feedback we successfully improved compliance to the standards of blood culture collection within our Emergency Department.
Biography:
Dale has been working in the Infection Prevention and Control field for a little over 2 years. He currently oversees the South Burnett Region, a rural cluster of the Darling Downs Health service, as an Infection Control Clinical Nurse.
His background is in Critical care nursing, spending a majority of his career in the intensive care unit at the Princess Alexandra Hospital.