Give Blood Culture Quality the Attention your Patients Deserve

Blood Cultures are the gold standard test for Sepsis diagnosis and an essential first step in infectious organism identification. Improving its quality is critical to the outcomes for a patient with suspected sepsis. Unfortunately, the test’s sensitivity and specificity are notoriously susceptible to variances in techniques and technologies used. Compromised sensitivity decreases the likelihood of identifying an infection if present whereas compromised specificity runs the risk of treating a falsely identified infection. Optimizing blood culture quality requires a team effort, starting with process improvements at the patient’s bedside.

 

Ensuring that key metrics are in place to monitor progress and target improvement is vital. Contamination rate is a key metric for assessing a hospital’s blood culture quality. Contaminated blood cultures result in false-positive findings that can have significant downstream effects on patient care including unnecessary antibiotic usage and antibiotic-related adverse effects as well as increased mortality, length of stay, and costs. With the recent national movement toward a 1% or less blood culture contamination goal, it’s crucial for every hospital to achieve sustained reductions in blood culture contamination.

 

As an Infection Preventionist and Former Regional Director of Infection Prevention at a large health system, Janet Conner, MT(ASCP), MSPH, CIC, is very familiar with the challenges that hospitals and healthcare systems face in achieving sustained reductions as individual departments or units following standard best practices alone. She will discuss the importance of a multi-disciplinary approach along with the application of an evidence-based blood culture collection bundle that has been proven to be effective in reducing contamination events. She will also explain how to employ the principles of a high reliability organization to achieve sustained compliance and desired outcomes with these new evidence-based practices.

 

Learning Objectives