Microbiological testing of devices used in maintaining peripheral venous catheters.
Fernanda de Paula Rossini, Denise de Andrade, Lissandra Chaves de Sousa Santos and 3 others
PMID 28513768WHAT IT FOUND
Peripheral catheter dressings and three-way stopcocks from 60 inpatient devices were contaminated: 86.7% dressings, 40% stopcock lumens, 100% external surfaces, including methicillin-resistant staphylococci.
Key findings
01Bacterial growth was found in 86.7% of dressing samples, 40% of three-way stopcock lumen samples, and 100% of three-way stopcock external surface samples.
02The main bacteria isolated were coagulase-negative Staphylococcus (51.3%), Staphylococcus aureus (12%), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (9.2%), and Klebsiella pneumoniae (9.2%).
03Multi-resistant microorganisms were reported in 44% of positive dressing samples, 35.7% of positive lumen samples, and 73.3% of positive external surface samples.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study did not follow patients for infection, so device contamination does not equal bloodstream infection. It was a small, single-centre descriptive study with 60 devices and 90 samples, and the data were analysed only descriptively. There was no comparison group and no tested intervention, so the paper cannot show that any practice change reduced contamination or infection. Dressing swabbing at one point may have missed contamination. The study did not measure hand hygiene or hub disinfection during care. Devices were removed for clinical reasons, so the sample may not represent all peripheral catheters in routine use. Some samples grew more than one bacterium, making it harder to link a single device surface to a single organism source.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the high contamination rates as proof that patients developed bloodstream infections or that a specific cleaning step prevents them. The study sampled devices after removal, did not measure patient infection outcomes, and had a small descriptive design.