News: Study offers surgical guidelines for preventing CAUTIs
A new study offers evidence-based guidelines for urinary catheter use in common surgeries to prevent catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI), AHA News reported. The researchers included national project partners from the On the CUSP: Stop CAUTI project, which developed a toolkit for reducing CAUTIs in hospitals.
The study looked at the appropriateness of catheter use by procedure and divided the appropriateness ratings for catheters in three groupings:
- Can perform surgery without a catheter
- Use intraoperatively only, ideally remove the catheter before leaving the operating room
- Use intraoperatively and keep catheter until postoperative days 1-4
Some of the common procedures falling into group one include (but aren’t limited to) open appendectomy, laparoscopic cholecystectomy, and unilateral total knee arthroplasty. Group two includes procedures such as bilateral total knee arthroplasty, unilateral partial prosthetic hip replacement, and bilateral total hip replacement/arthroplasty. Group three includes procedures such as open subtotal colectomy, open abdominal perineal resection, and open or laparoscopic total proctocolectomy.
According to a March 2018 study published by the American Journal of Infection Control, a CAUTI can cost a hospital anywhere from $876 to $10,197.
Editor’s note: To read the AHA announcement related to this study, click here. To read the full study results, click here. To read about the estimated costs of CAUTIs, click here.