Decreasing Blood Culture Contamination Rates: Simple quality improvement strategies can improve quality outcomes

Purpose:
Blood culture contamination rates were found to be above the acceptable ranges that would produce reliable results and quality antibiotic therapy decisions.

Significance:
Blood culture results help to drive antibiotic therapy used to treat systemic infections. Poor quality collection practice will lead to unreliable results, incorrect antibiotic therapy, and a delay in appropriate care.

Strategy and Implementation:
Quality improvement can occur on very simple levels but have a tremendous impact on patient outcomes across an entire healthcare system. Simple lab reports that track specimen quality associated with collector indentification can help target staff that need education or redirection in their collection practice. Good data collection and reporting can create the dash-board that guides your efforts to improvement. Department wide education is good but identifying specific staff that consistently produce poor quality specimens will help consolidate the educators efforts. Constant monitoring and providing customized educational response to improve the quality of targeted individual practice will improve your overall department quality outcomes.

Evaluation:
Baseline blood culture contamination rates established at 5.0% to 6.0%. General educaton had little inpact on reduction of contamination rates. Identification of individual poor quality collections and after customized individual education, consistent contamination rates of 1.0% to 2.0% persist.

Implications for Practice:
Decreased blood culture contamination rates result in more accurate on-target antibiotic therapy which improves patient outcomes, decreases hospital lengths of stay, and improves fiscal outcomes for patients and hospital.