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Website spotlight: Recruiting nurses in the fight against CLABSI

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, September 23, 2011

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Even with all the effort infection preventionists (IP) put into data collection, surveillance, and education on a daily basis to prevent central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI), sometimes all it takes is the dedication of a few nurses to get the desired results.

A study presented at APIC's 2011 annual conference, held June 27-29 in Baltimore, showed that by appointing IC nurses to specifically oversee central line insertion and maintenance procedures, a hospital could eliminate CLABSIs in a matter of months.
Researchers from the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) showed that dedicated nurses on the facility's surgical ICU (SICU) sustained a rate of zero CLABSIs for a 25-week period, eliminating an estimated 14 infections and saving two to three lives. The reduction also saved the hospital more than $200,000 over the six-month period.

"This is truly an example of taking infection prevention directly to the patient's bedside," Russell N. Olmsted, MPH, CIC, APIC's 2011 president, said in a press release.

Although the infection prevention department helped educate nurses on evidence-based best practices and collected data on subsequent infections, the nursing department was the primary driver, says Michael Anne Preas, RN, BSN, CIC, an IP at UMMC and lead author of the study.

"The director of nursing for the med-surg division said, 'I don't care how you get this done. If you need to assign someone specifically to monitor these activities, then let's do that,' " Preas says. "So that was what they did, and they made reducing infections a big deal."
 
Before implementing devoted IC nurses on the SICU, the nursing department held a multidisciplinary educational summit that revolved around IC. During the half-day in-house conference, nurses from the SICU and ICU—with help from the IC department—presented on various infection prevention measures such as hand hygiene, best practices to prevent ventilator-associated pneumonia and catheter-associated urinary tract infections, and the well-known prevention measures for insertion and maintenance of central lines. It was then that the nursing staff realized the impact that could be made simply by ensuring that each step on the CLABSI checklist was followed during each procedure.

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Editor's note: To read the rest of this free article, visit the Reading Room, part of www.StrategiesForNurseManagers.com.

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