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Catheter-drawn blood cultures: is withdrawing the heparin lock beneficial?
Richard Everts1, Hamish Harding
1Microbiology Section Medlab Central Palmerston North New Zealand. richard.everts@nmhs.govt.nz
Aims:
To assess the potential benefit of withdrawing or flushing away the heparin lock before collecting blood for culture from a central venous catheter.
Methods:
We compared the contamination rates of 152 pairs of blood samples aspirated from central venous catheters in afebrile renal dialysis or cancer patients. We also assessed the antimicrobial effect of 2000 U of heparin in Bactec Plus Aerobic/F culture bottles inoculated with a volunteer's blood plus one of six common bloodstream pathogens.
Results:
There was no significant difference in contamination rates between first-drawn (26 of 152, 17.1%) and second-drawn (24 of 152, 15.8%) samples. There was no significance difference in yield (58 of 60 [97%] versus 52 of 53 [98%]) or time to flagging positive (16.6 versus 16.7 h) between the bottles with and without heparin.
Conclusions:
Our results do not support the practice of withdrawing or flushing away the heparin lock before collecting blood for culture from a central venous catheter.
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