Reducing blood culture contamination rate: A quality assurance project in a Malaysian tertiary hospital

Abstract

Blood cultures contamination is a common scenario in Malaysian hospitals. Reducing the contamination rate of blood culture will reduce false-positive blood culture, prevent inappropriate antibiotic prescription and reduce patient management cost. This is a 6 months study specifically focused on the effects of changing the type of skin antiseptics used (70% isopropyl alcohol plus 2% chlorhexidine replacing 70% isopropyl alcohol plus povidone-iodine) and improving the knowledge and techniques of blood culture taking in a tertiary hospital. the remedial measures introduced were successful in achieving 4.34% contamination rate, which is 2.03% less than pre-remedial contamination rate (6.37%). There was a statistically significant reduction in the number of contaminants (p = 0.02) with five-fold rise in the significant blood cultures results. Better choice of skin antiseptics and good blood culture knowledge and technique may contribute to reduce number of contamination rate in blood culture.

Blood culture contamination in a tertiary care hospital of Saudi Arabia

“…9 Blood culture contamination has been reported to be reduced from 6.37% to 4.34% in a Malaysian hospital postintervention. 23 The higher rates of contamination have also been ascribed to the newer, continuous monitoring blood culture systems, which detect microbial growth more efficiently and quickly that were missed in the earlier conventional methods. The new molecular techniques such as multiplex PCR-based assays and nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT) also facilitate rapid identification of bacteria in positive BC bottles.…”

Evaluation of Quality Assurance Indicators and Contamination Rate in Blood Culture

“…Ramli et al found a significant relationship between pre-and post-corrective action in their study to reduce blood culture contamination. They stated that a multidisciplinary approach that includes various strategies on raising awareness, lifelong training, technical improvement and monitoring of contamination rate may provide an important solution to decrease the contamination rate in the long term (13). Veranyurt et al found the average contamination rate as 4.30% in their study comparing the years 2016-2018.…”