Report and Take Action

Prevent Adult Blood Culture Contamination: A Quality Tool for Clinical Laboratory Professionals

Key points

  • Monitor blood culture contamination (BCC) and single-set rates to help improve blood culture collection.
  • Regular rate reporting and multi-disciplinary team collaboration enhance practices.
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Overview

Evaluating the BCC rate at the same time as the single-set rate provides crucial insight into the blood culture collection practices in the clinical setting. Any gaps revealed during the evaluation process show a need for laboratories to investigate and determine mitigation strategies. This allows clinicians to improve compliance with best practices and standardization of the process.

CDC’s goal in developing and promoting this quality measure is to optimize blood culture collection and laboratory diagnostics for all patients, no matter when or where the blood culture is collected.

Report and follow up on BCC and single-set collection rates

Clinical laboratories could calculate the BCC and single-set rates as quality monitors at the beginning of the month. This will allow you to evaluate your clinical staff's compliance with blood culture collection best practices and determine the need for, or monitor the effectiveness of, mitigation strategies.

Laboratory staff could meet with their facility's antibiotic stewardship and infection prevention personnel to educate them about the BCC and single-set quality measures. This provides an opportunity to discuss how tracking these events can be used to monitor and evaluate practices to improve processes. You can also target improvement efforts by sharing reports showing rates classified by patient care locations and collection staff (e.g., nursing or phlebotomy teams.)

Working with your antibiotic stewardship committee on potential mitigation strategies

Some mitigation strategies that could be implemented when working with your antibiotic stewardship team include:

  1. Diagnostic stewardship
  2. Proper skin antisepsis
  3. Blood culture bottle disinfection
  4. Blood culture collection site
  5. Hand hygiene
  6. Phlebotomy teams and education on proper technique
  7. Surveillance and feedback
  8. Diversion devices

By generating, reporting, and acting on the BCC and single-set rates, you can reduce false positive and false negative blood culture results. Clinical laboratories can use this data to address patient safety opportunities by improving the quality of the blood culture testing process.

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Content Source:
Division of Laboratory Systems (DLS)