calculating bloodstream infection rates

[iluvivt, BSN, RN]

to anyone currently calculating your PICC CRBSI rate. what i would like to know is......if the catheter tip results are positive with greater than 15 CFU's but noone obtained a seperate blood specimen from a peripheral site or from the PICC ......are you counting this as Pspositve when you use the formula for CRBSI per 1000 catheter days. currently i am calculating the rate monthly. There are 7 members on our team and we placed 1710 PICCs last year.....in addition to our other duties......our infection rate is about 1 per mo so far.....we are the only:balloons: ones that perform dsg changes and cap changes.....when we let certain units perform this care our infection rate increases drastically