Improve Hygiene to curb Catheter related deaths - Study
The usage of catheters in the hospitals may cause death instead of saving lives, if proper hygienic methods are not followed. According to the researchers, deadly bloodstream infections are caused due to the central venous catheters that carry liquids and pills when inserted through the blood vessels ending near or in the heart of the intensive care unit (ICU) patients.
The usage of catheters in the hospitals may cause death instead of saving lives, if proper hygienic methods are not followed. According to the researchers, deadly bloodstream infections are caused due to the central venous catheters that carry liquids and pills when inserted through the blood vessels ending near or in the heart of the intensive care unit patients.
A study shows that about 28,000 people are killed due to the catheter related blood infections. Also, it is suspected that strands of the resin could potentially obstruct a blood vessel, resulting in complications such as stroke, heart attack, or kidney problems. Few patients had even complained of migraine headaches also.
Dr. Peter Pronovost, medical director of the Johns Hopkins' Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care in Baltimore, Md., and his colleagues carried out a study at Michigan in 108 intensive care units that lasted for 15 months, and said that the hospitals feel that it would cost them, lots of money and time to take care of safety of their patients.
The team designated few steps that aimed at reducing infections in their project, which included better hand washing, special cleaning, removal of useless catheters at appropriate time, placing the catheters at other body areas of a patient other than groin area, as it would be difficult to sterilize that area.
Without providing an excuse to opt out of the study, Keystone ICU project invited all the Michigan Hospitals with ICUs to participate. Even, five out-of-state hospitals with their headquarters at Michigan participated in this project, wherein the safety measures were strictly followed for the patients on catheters.
The well trained, hospital-based infection-control practitioner collected the data about the number of catheter related bloodstream infections and the duration of usage of a catheter, which was used monthly in the study.
"Our data destroys this myth by showing that profound improvements can be made with minimum cost and effort, as long as clinical teams are committed to improving safety and willing to diligently observe relatively simple safety measures."
These steps helped in the reduction of catheter-related bloodstream infections from twenty-seven cases to zero for every 10,000 days a tube. The study checked the success of these steps continuously for 15 months.
Dr. Richard Wenzel and Dr. Michael Edmond of Virginia Commonwealth University recommended that all the hospitals should adopt these techniques in an editorial accompanying the study.
"We can no longer accept the variations in safety culture, behaviour or systems of practice that have plagued medical care for decades," they said.
They also said that if these techniques were adopted by 6000 acute care hospitals in the United States with commitment and discipline, the effect would be unimaginable.
