AVA Conference Will Highlight Patient Safety Gains with SwabCap, SwabFlush

According to two presentations scheduled for the upcoming annual scientific meeting of the Association for Vascular Access (AVA), SwabCap® helped improve patient safety at two Texas medical centers and a four-hospital health system, The meeting will be held Sept. 20-23 in Nashville, Tenn.

A scientific poster will show how two Texas hospitals improved compliance with disinfection protocols for IV connectors (which are also known as hubs or valves). The hospitals first implemented SwabCap and then upgraded to SwabFlush.

The poster details research which indicated that using SwabCap® disinfection caps and SwabFlush®, which includes a SwabCap held in the plunger of a flush syringe, making the cap conveniently available at the point of care, improved compliance with IV connector disinfection protocols.

Before implementing either of the devices, compliance with the existing "scrub the hub" protocol was only 6 percent. Implementing SwabCap brought compliance up to 49.2 percent, a more-than-eight-fold improvement. The changeover to SwabFlush raised compliance to 83.4 percent, representing an overall improvement of nearly fourteen-fold.

The poster is by Rachel Seiler, MPH, CIC and Shanté Meyer, MPH.

The conference will also feature an invited roundtable session presentation about successful SwabCap use at the four-hospital NorthShore University Health System (Evanston, Ill.) SwabCap improved disinfection of IV connectors and improved patient safety beyond what the health system's previous central-line bundle could achieve.

The talk will be by NorthShore's corporate director of infection control, Marc-Oliver Wright, MT (ASCP), MS, CIC. It will take place on Monday, Sept. 23 from 7 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. in Tennessee Ballroom D. Wright's article about NorthShore's study of SwabCap use appeared in the January 2013 issue of the American Journal of Infection Control.

Source: Excelsior Medical Corp