The indwelling tunneled pleural catheter has altered the management of patients with dyspnea related to malignant pleural effusions. Indwelling tunneled pleural catheter placement does not remain free from risk; with infection the most commonly reported risk.
The aim of this paper was to describe our continuous quality improvement program aimed at infection rate recognition, the process changes implemented for improvement, and subsequent outcomes.
All patients undergoing indwelling tunneled pleural catheter placement from May 2009 - April 2014 were identified. The primary outcome was the incidence of infection within the pre-intervention and intervention cohort. Intervention was identified as: use of pre-operative antibiotics, full sterile draping, and limiting placement to a single defined location.
225 indwelling tunneled pleural catheter placements were performed on 201 patients during the study period with an overall infection rate of 5.8%. During the pre-intervention period 134 placements were performed and 91 placements occurred during the intervention period. A pre-intervention infection rate was identified as 8.2% with a significant decrease to 2.2% (p=0.049) within the intervention cohort.
The use of a continuous quality improvement program to review indwelling tunneled pleural catheter practices can result in the identification of infectious complications and implement measures to improve patient outcomes.
Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutical Science
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Agricultural and Biological Sciences
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Other
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Unknown
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Attention Score in Context
Attention Score in Context
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 24 June 2015.
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#24,712,082
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#3,175
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Outputs of similar age from Annals of the American Thoracic Society
#74
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