An excellent story here about Jordan Hospital's success in avoiding catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs). Note the important elements of process improvement, starting right with the governing body. Note, too, the lack of acceptance of industry benchmarks: The aim is zero. Zero is achieved!
Excerpts:
An intensive education program involving the hospital's Board of Trustees and personnel in the Emergency Department, Critical Care Center (CCC) and other units throughout the hospital, has been followed by daily and even hourly assessments of patients with catheters. The surveillance, discussion, and effort to curb infections are unending and are now ingrained within the hospital's culture.
"We began with the premise that anytime you insert anything into a person's body that they didn't come into the hospital with, it increases their susceptibility to infection," says Kathleen M. Mercurio, R.N., infection preventionist at Jordan.
The challenge at Jordan was threefold - to reduce catheter associated urinary tract infections in the Critical Care Center (which is what Jordan calls its ICU); to decrease the number of days a Foley catheter stays in a patient (hence decreasing the chance for infection); and to promote alternatives to Foleys that are non-invasive.
Nurses on each shift have to enter computerized documentation, answering, among other items: When was the catheter inserted? Where was it put in? (In the ED, CCC or on a med/surg floor) and why was it inserted. To answer the "why," a nurse has to check off on the computer screen one of the CDC-approved guidelines. Those same questions are answered for each patient when a new shift begins, demonstrating that for a quality-improvement strategy to work, repetition of many tasks is imperative.
"We had to create new strategies and processes easy for everyone involved. Using and incorporating a new process into their daily workflow requires a systematic, sensible approach," Mercurio says.
"Anytime you want to change a person's habits, you have to give that person a reason for the change - a reason that hits something inside of them that makes them value the change," Mercurio says. For the different cultures throughout the hospital, the reasons she gave varied.
In July and November of 2012 and January and February of 2013, Jordan Hospital had one patient in each of those months who developed a CAUTI. That's not a terrible track record, but as Mercurio says, "One is too many. One is someone's dad getting an infection."
But from March through August 2013 (the latest full month recorded), Jordan Hospital has had zero CAUTIs.
And, the number of Foley catheter days - that is, the number of days that patients had catheters - steadily dropped, evidence of the strategy of removing them as soon as possible. The decrease in Foley catheter days occurred even as patient days in the CCC increased. That is, more patients, less days with them having catheters, and less chance of them getting an infection.
Excerpts:
An intensive education program involving the hospital's Board of Trustees and personnel in the Emergency Department, Critical Care Center (CCC) and other units throughout the hospital, has been followed by daily and even hourly assessments of patients with catheters. The surveillance, discussion, and effort to curb infections are unending and are now ingrained within the hospital's culture.
"We began with the premise that anytime you insert anything into a person's body that they didn't come into the hospital with, it increases their susceptibility to infection," says Kathleen M. Mercurio, R.N., infection preventionist at Jordan.
The challenge at Jordan was threefold - to reduce catheter associated urinary tract infections in the Critical Care Center (which is what Jordan calls its ICU); to decrease the number of days a Foley catheter stays in a patient (hence decreasing the chance for infection); and to promote alternatives to Foleys that are non-invasive.
Nurses on each shift have to enter computerized documentation, answering, among other items: When was the catheter inserted? Where was it put in? (In the ED, CCC or on a med/surg floor) and why was it inserted. To answer the "why," a nurse has to check off on the computer screen one of the CDC-approved guidelines. Those same questions are answered for each patient when a new shift begins, demonstrating that for a quality-improvement strategy to work, repetition of many tasks is imperative.
"We had to create new strategies and processes easy for everyone involved. Using and incorporating a new process into their daily workflow requires a systematic, sensible approach," Mercurio says.
"Anytime you want to change a person's habits, you have to give that person a reason for the change - a reason that hits something inside of them that makes them value the change," Mercurio says. For the different cultures throughout the hospital, the reasons she gave varied.
In July and November of 2012 and January and February of 2013, Jordan Hospital had one patient in each of those months who developed a CAUTI. That's not a terrible track record, but as Mercurio says, "One is too many. One is someone's dad getting an infection."
But from March through August 2013 (the latest full month recorded), Jordan Hospital has had zero CAUTIs.
And, the number of Foley catheter days - that is, the number of days that patients had catheters - steadily dropped, evidence of the strategy of removing them as soon as possible. The decrease in Foley catheter days occurred even as patient days in the CCC increased. That is, more patients, less days with them having catheters, and less chance of them getting an infection.
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