Description
Clinical Care Improvement Strategies: Preventing Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections is your authoritative guide to ensure the safety of patients who have urinary catheters.
Features include:
- • A description of The Joint Commission’s new National Patient Safety Goal to prevent CAUTIs
- • A thorough explanation of best practices to insert urinary catheters, including following appropriate indications, using aseptic technique, and removing these as soon as medically possible
- • Detailed descriptions of best practices to care for urinary catheters, including properly securing and positioning the collection system, maintaining a closed system, and checking the collection system
- • A discussion of how health care organizations should perform surveillance for CAUTIs, including equations for outcome and process measures
- • Tips, tools, and case examples to help improve staff compliance with CAUTI preventive strategies (many of the tools are customizable)
Stop CAUTIs from causing harm to your patients!
• Urinary tract infections are the most common type of health care–associated infection in health care settings around the world, and the vast majority of these are catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs).
• As many as half of urinary catheters are placed inappropriately, and one third remain in place longer than medically necessary.
• Physicians often forget that their patients are catheterized or do not remember why they have urinary catheters.
• The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services does not reimburse for CAUTIs that are not present on admission.
Urinary catheters are inserted for a variety of medically necessary reasons, but as these statements indicate, they can also cause medical harm. Fortunately, the majority of CAUTIs can be prevented by strict adherence to evidence-based guidelines. Additionally, the Partnership for Patients initiative has targeted hospital-acquired conditions, including CAUTIs, for a 40% reduction by 2013. And in spring 2011, The Joint Commission introduced a new National Patient Safety Goal to prevent CAUTIs.
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