A national survey of interventions and practices in the prevention of blood culture contamination and associated adverse health care events

Blood culture contamination in a tertiary care hospital of Saudi Arabia

“…4 A nation-wide survey of blood culture practices in U.S. revealed BCC rates as >3% in 14% of hospitals. 5 While another study reported 2.9% average adult inpatient contamination rate within U.S. hospitals. 2 Low rate of false positivity in blood cultures is a hallmark or primary performance indicator for any microbiological laboratory.…”

“…2 Blood culture contamination negatively impacts the patient's health as the patient is exposed to unnecessary antibiotics, and has prolonged hospital stay, further compounding the treatment costs. 5,7 Moreover, the excessive antibiotic usage results in emergence of drug-resistant strains, toxicity, drug interactions and other adverse effects. The clinicians rely on patient's clinical manifestations of symptoms and hematological abnormalities (leucopenia/leukocytosis and elevated inflammatory markers), laboratory identification of the microbial isolate, number of positive culture sets, time to growth, use of indwelling device during hospitalization such as catheter tips for intravenous infusions, to predict if the culture is genuinely positive or contaminated, as some microbes rarely cause BSIs.…”

Collection, transport and storage procedures for blood culture specimens in adult patients: recommendations from a board of Italian experts

“…The process involves various health personnel, who must operate in agreement with good clinical practice within a multidisciplinary team. In addition to the doctors and nurses engaged in the diagnostic process, the hospital pharmacist with infectious disease training plays an important role, because he/she is responsible for the procurement, proper preservation and, together with the other personnel involved, the choice of pharmaceutical products required for correct BC practice, which undeniably have an impact on the validity of the test [69,[81][82][83][84][85].…”

Estimation of missed bloodstream infections without the third blood culture set: a retrospective observational single-centre study

“…Furthermore, we must emphasize the possible loss of 10/298 cases of candidemia and six cases of MRSA bacteraemia because of the high morbidity and mortality of these infections [21e24]. Prior studies have reported contamination rates of less than 3% of positive blood cultures, in which CoNS was the most frequent microorganism (44.0%) [25,26].…”