Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control is calling for submissions to our Collection on Safe Intravascular Catheters: Finding and Preventing Bloodstream Infections. Effective healthcare is unthinkable without intravascular catheters of all types (peripheral, central, venous, arterial). Hundreds of millions of these catheters are used each year globally to treat both acute and chronic disease, across every clinical specialty and for neonates through to the elderly.
Intravascular catheters necessarily break the skin barrier and expose the bloodstream to potential direct entry of microorganisms. Thus, catheter-associated bloodstream infections have long been a patient safety challenge with one third of all healthcare associated bloodstream infections due to intravascular catheters. These deadly but avoidable complications cause substantial human suffering, many deaths, and high associated treatment costs. Infection prevention for patients with intravascular catheters is an established field, but new thinking is always required to innovate approaches and to harness emerging opportunities, particularly those arising from new technologies and models of care.
In this collection, we aim to focus on various aspects of intravascular catheter safety measures. They include avoiding unnecessary catheters, optimal catheter choice, safe insertion, safe maintenance and use, appropriate timely removal, patient/consumer partnership, surveillance, definitions, competent and adequate workforce, risk factor identification, novel medical devices, and clinical practices, interprofessional and interdisciplinary approaches, quality and safety initiatives and systems. All catheter types and patient populations are relevant in infection prevention efforts. We invite authors to submit original research, reviews, brief reports, commentaries.
