Reducing the Risk of Indwelling Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection in Female Patients by Implementing an...

The purpose of this quality improvement project was to reduce catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI) risk for female patients by implementing a female external urinary collection (FEUC) device with suction as an alternative to indwelling catheter (IDC).

Participants were female patients admitted to our 386-bed community hospital in Southern California and who required urinary management.

We implemented a comprehensive CAUTI prevention program in 2014 that was in place for 1.5 years before this project was started. The CAUTI prevention program was based on the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention's CAUTI prevention recommendations. To supplement our CAUTI prevention efforts in our female patients, we implemented the FEUC device in our intensive care, telemetry, medical-surgical, orthopedic, and acute rehabilitations inpatient care units. Indwelling catheter use and CAUTI cases were identified by our Infection Prevention department.

Prior to introduction of the FEUC device, in 2015, the baseline female IDC utilization rate was 31.7% (7181 IDC device-days/22,656 patient-days) and the female CAUTI rate was 1.11 (8 cases/7181 IDC device-days) per 1000 days. Following introduction of the device, both rates declined. In 2016, the IDC utilization rate was 29.7% (P = .000) and the CAUTI rate was 0% (P =.005). We continued to observe a reduction in 2017 IDC utilization rates of 26% (P = .000); the 2017 CAUTI rate of 0.90 was not significantly different to our prior year rate (P = .726).

We found that the introduction of the FEUC device reduced the risk for CAUTI. We will continue to prioritize the use of external devices for urinary management to help reduce the risk of our patients developing CAUTI.