Purpose/Objectives: When blood culture contamination in emergency departments is above 3%, it is associated with adverse patient outcomes, inappropriate antibiotic use, and increased hospital costs. In a large, Midwestern, level I trauma hospital, there is a blood culture contamination (BCC) rate of 8.32%. Description of the Project: The project entailed creating an education process, including principles of aseptic technique, skin and bottle preparation, sample transfer, and ensuring all supplies are readily available. Data collected included the overall number of blood cultures completed by nursing staff, the number of contaminated specimens, the type of contamination, and the contamination rate. Outcomes: The goal of reducing blood culture contamination by one percent was exceeded. The contamination rate was reduced from 8.3% to 4.4%. Conclusion: A reduction in nurse drawn blood culture contamination was observed. However, they were unable to achieve the recommended standard of less than three percent contamination. Potential barriers to achieving this reduction could be attributed to resistance from staff to perform the procedure correctly, the fast-paced environment, a high rate of staff turnover, and an increase in patients being boarded in the emergency department. Discussion: This project has potential to improve patient outcomes by decreasing false-positive blood cultures, improving patient satisfaction, reducing the length of stay, decreasing need for unnecessary antibiotics, and decreasing hospital-acquired conditions. This organization has multiple hospitals in its healthcare system. The quality improvement project, education, and intervention will be introduced at all the remaining EDs in the system which could decrease overall hospital costs by $27,000 to $117,000 dollars per month.
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