Single patient use BP cuffs

sharann, it may be do to that your thread here needs more member visibility. I am moving it to the General Nursing Discussion forum to assist you in that. Maybe, this will help.

We use a new cuff for each and every patient.

I have not seen any studies regarding this. I have worked for some hospitals that have a disposable cuff for every patient and others that use communal cuffs. And to be truthful, I can tell you that I have no idea whether the staff disinfected the cuffs between use of every patient or not. I prefer individual cuffs. Especially when you need a larger or smaller cuff than what is on the machine or wall. Sometimes no matter how much you disinfect a cuff, it just seem funky when you have a pt with skin oozing or one that wipes wound exudate on things.

In our hospital every patient has a BP cuff on the wall above the bed. BUT everyone uses the nurse on a stick instead of taking a manual BP. So maybe if we actually used to manual BP cuff we could prevent infection spread. But the CNAs and PCTs don't carry stethoscopes when they do their vitals... And the are supposed to clean the BP cuff between rooms.... But I know they don't do it all the time.

The hospital I'm on assignment with uses a new disposable cuff for every pt. It attaches to the Dynamap but each cuff is individual.

The rationale here is how many of your pts have some kind of weep or ooze from an IV site edema or some kind of cantact bacteris that they don't want to transmit.

First place I've ever been like this and when you think about it..... how often does the one BP cuff per floor REALLY get cleaned?

in our dialysis unit, the MRSAer's have their own cuff, stored in a plastic bag, in a separate drawer.

Have you done a literature search? There was a recent article in Nursing Management regarding a hospital which was able to drastically reduce the spread of MRSA through a new infection control program. I don't think that the use of disposable blood pressure cuffs was one of their interventions.

I've heard that our local VA hospital uses individual cuffs for each patient and also swabs every patient for MRSA on admission. They have been able to almost eliminate the spread of MRSA (or so I've been told).

Todd

"Nurse on a stick" Never heard that before, but I love it! (You can bet I'm hijacking that term first chance I get!).

I'm troubled by use of a common cuff also, same for the common finger probe on the pulse-ox. I'm not sure if the probes are even designed to be exposed to a harsh disinfectant or even EtOH that often. We don't have a clear procedure for cleaning cuffs between uses, and I suspect the most they get is a cursory swipe before being put away. If someone thinks to do it. And has time to let it dry before it's needed again. We do Q 4 hr VS, plus PRN before BP meds of if pt is feeling CP, SOB or otherwise ill. We have 3 VS machines on an 18 pt unit. There is a sphing/ cuff in each room and all rooms are singles but again- I'm not sure if these are reliably cleaned between on pt's discharge and the next admission to the room. We try to leave a machine in the room if we have a pt on contact precautions and all precaution pts do get a disposable steth but frequently we have 3 or more pt on precautions...I don't know what the answer is but this does seem like a probable vector for all sorts of bad bugs and I would like to know how well say, MRSA grows on the surface of a cuff...Yeesh.