[littlepeach]

Does anyone routinely do eye c&s when receiving a transfer? We have been receiving a lot of back transport feeder/growers with a lot of eye gunk. Our transferring hospital said they do not do eye cultures because they said that most kids are growing something. HUH? We had one recently grow an anaerobic feacalis. Cultured as soon as we received the baby. How does your unit handle eye drainage?

[elizabells]

We don't do them routinely, but if a kid's eye is gunky we'll culture it. You get some naaasty stuff growing in eyes.

On an even grosser note, today I had a 2 day old baby whose right eye was stuck closed with vernix! She'd gone straight from the DR to the OR for a gastroschisis repair, so she never got a bath or anything. I really hate combing days old blood and dried vernix out of a baby's hair. Hate it a lot.

[Sweeper933]

We only swab their eyes if we notice gross stuff accumulating in there. Often times we'll swab their eye, then wait till we see one of the docs to get the order to send it down. We had a run of nasty stuff growing back from a bunch of babies a while back. We changed some things around on the unit and the incidence of eye infections has gone back down.

[littleneoRN]

Only if it's persistently and significantly gunky. And not seemingly related to a recent eye exam. (which only sort of makes sense...). It can be tough to talk our practitioners into culturing sometimes, but when we do there always is something growing. Go figure.

Specifically speaking to transfers--we only really ever get them from within our own hospital or outlying delivery rooms. So we don't do routine cultures on transfers.