Blood Culture Collection Bundle

Blood cultures are a crucial diagnostic tool for doctors while treating sepsis. One of the leading causes of death and morbidity is bloodstream infection. Rapid and accurate testing for identifying pathogen aids in the administration of the proper antibiotics, which helps to improve clinical outcomes. Automated systems have many advantages such as increased sensitivity, decreased contamination, faster detection time and simplified laboratory workflow. Furthermore, they have the provision of keeping bottles for extended incubation when fastidious organisms are suspected. These features have made them the standard of care in the diagnostic algorithm of managing patients with sepsis. 

A true positive blood culture gives a definitive diagnosis that enables to start of targeted therapy. The value of this crucial test is, however, severely constrained by false-positive results brought on by blood culture contamination, which wastes laboratory resources and increases the possibility of inaccurate reporting to the clinical team. 

Contamination of blood cultures can reduce the standard of care, expose patients to unneeded antibiotics, and lengthen their stay in the hospital. The source of contamination for all blood cultures is typically the patient's skin, the hub or cannula of an indwelling catheter and inadequate skin disinfection, which happens during blood collection. When a microbe with dubious evidence is isolated, such as Coagulase-Negative Staphylococci, Bacillus spp., viridans group Streptococci, Corynebacterium spp., Propionibacterium spp., or Micrococcus, it becomes difficult to differentiate between pathogenic and contaminant.

In order to reduce blood culture contamination rates and enhance the collection of blood culture specimens, laboratories should develop and implement interventions. They may also be enlisted to maximize multidisciplinary quality improvement initiatives. Blood culture contamination rates should be tracked by microbiology laboratories, and they should give information to help reduce it.

Despite all this, blood culture testing continues to be the gold standard for detecting bacteremia. By using the Blood Culture Collection bundle, contamination can be considerably decreased. Lets go over the easy actions that should be taken to lessen the contamination of blood cultures.