Teamwork and training at the labs at CRH has seen compliance in out-of-hours bood cultures almost double in nine months - resulting in improved outcomes for patients.

This all began when an audit in July 2015 highlighted that only 9% of these blood cultures were being incubated in the blood-culture machine within four hours of collection. 

Since then the team has worked hard to make improvements at the Calderdale site and compliance has improved from 41% to more than 70% in nine months.

Senior Biomedical Scientist, Paula Dadson, said: “By working together as a team in pathology, we have improved the diagnosis of severe illness including sepsis. This quality improvement can potentially lead to appropriate antibiotic treatment and better outcomes for patients and cost savings for the Trust”.

The recommendation of a maximum of four hours comes from the UK National laboratory standards which states that ‘Early identification and antibiotic susceptibility results for blood culture isolates provide valuable diagnostic information on which appropriate antimicrobial therapy can be based, so helping to reduce morbidity and mortality, improve patient care and reduce healthcare cost’.

To improve compliance with this standard, we enlisted the help of our colleagues within pathology who are present in the laboratory when on-call out-of-hours.

After a period of training, the biomedical scientists and laboratory assistants in Biochemistry were putting these blood-cultures onto the machine when received in the laboratory, thereby reducing overnight delays and improving patient care.

Work is ongoing to bring about similar improvements at the Huddersfield site.