Blood culture: improvement project through training and feedback of results and quality criteria

Although blood culture is one of the most important tests in a microbiology laboratory, the need for its request is not always well understood by the clinician, and its execution is frequently wrong. In order to improve the quality of the application and enforcement of blood cultures, 15 training sessions for clinicians and nurses in groups of about 100 at a time with ECM were carried out.The protocol was published in the Intranet site of the CIO (Controllo Infezioni Ospedaliere). Blood cultures were subsequently performed for the departments that collected more than 50 samples/semester and provided a report every six months. This report contained the pertinent information, including the number of blood cultures that were collected from the peripheral vein, the artery or by catheter, the number of samples collected correctly (at least 2 during 48 hours) and incorrectly (single set in 48 hours), the rate of contamination and the percentage of positive cultures.When the indexes were inconsistent with the established quality criteria, a warning signal was issued. In the case of too large inconsistencies, the report was handed directly to the Head of the department, with whom the possible causes of inadequacy and how to correct them were discussed. In this work we propose this system aimed at improving the quality of blood cultures.