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

Details

• Corporate Authors:
  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S.). Office of Laboratory Systems and Response. Division of Laboratory Systems
• Description:
  Preventing adult blood culture contamination and ensuring an adequate volume of blood is collected for blood culture testing.
  
  Protect Patients during the Diagnostic Process by Monitoring Adult Blood Culture Contamination (BCC) Rates: Laboratory analysis of blood cultures is vital to the accurate and timely diagnosis of bloodstream infections. However, the reliability of your testing depends on clinical compliance with collection procedures that limit the risk of inconclusive or incorrect results. False negative blood culture results due to inadequate volumes of blood can result in misdiagnosis, delay therapy, and put patients at heightened risk of morbidity and mortality from bacteremia. Likewise, the presence of commonly occurring bacteria or fungi on human skin (i.e., commensal organisms) can increase the risk of false positives, compromising care by leading to unnecessary antibiotic therapy and prolonged hospitalization. In December 2022, a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) consensus-based organization endorsed a CDC proposal for a new patient safety measure to address these concerns (see Quality Measures | CMS for more on this topic). CDC developed this quality measure to promote blood culture best practices and improve the laboratory diagnosis of bloodstream infection. The Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 (CLIA) state that laboratories must monitor, assess, and when indicated, correct problems identified in their preanalytic systems. Using the methods provided in this quality tool to calculate the BCC and single-set rates will help meet this standard and ensure optimal blood culture collection. In addition, this quality measure incorporates best practices on blood culture collection from the Clinical & Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) and the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA). These best practices are already in place at many laboratories across the nation and have shown to improve the laboratory diagnosis of bacteremia, significantly reduce incidence of BCC, and limit unnecessary antibiotic therapy. CDC strongly encourages you to adopt these practices into your laboratory’s standard operating procedures (SOPs), to integrate this measure into your quality management system, and to work with infection control and antibiotic stewardship programs to educate and train clinical staff on their use.
  
  
• Content Notes:
  Publication date supplied by authors.
• Subjects:
  Blood Blood Culture Blood Specimen Collection Clinical Laboratory Techniques Equipment Contamination False Negative Reactions False Positive Reactions Infection Control Laboratories
• Publisher:
  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S.) (CDC)
• Document Type:
  Text
• Genre:
  Pamphlet (or Booklet) ; Guideline
• CIO:
  Office of Laboratory Systems and Response (OLSR)
• Division:
  Division of Laboratory Systems (DLS)
• Topic:
  Other
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  7 pdf pages
• Collection(s):
  Public Health Resources
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:1678a790a89f1cbc304be1079bbe80f53a9d79cd6b4a5445ad6d81eace6eaf49ed0af5069ec572c0f59ade4ae57534b7320c0b7e86cadaa2c385d2b0d6c55f12
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/177096/cdc_177096_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 856.24 KB ]