Benchmarking help! Please rally!

[mochikat]

Hello lovely fellow nurses! I am a nurse at a pediatric hospital and am reaching out to other organizations for assistance with some benchmarking that we are doing for a quality improvement project regarding inadvertent clamping of lines (piggyback/secondary infusions as well as continuous syringe infusions).

It would be so helpful if you all would be willing to share with me the following information:

Name of children's hospital & whether or not secondary/piggybacks are utilized. (Some organizations have gone away with piggyback infusions altogether and it has been a challenge to identify which organizations those are).

I would also be interested to know in which pediatric organizations that clamping of microbore tubing on continuous syringe infusions is NEVER done, or organizations that use microbore tubing WITHOUT clamps.

Thanks so much! If this sort of post is not allowed, please let me know!

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

I think this type of post is allowed, but you are not likely to get many responses. One of the benefits of AN is being able to post anonymously. By posting policies from where they work, posters will greatly decrease their anonymity, and potentially violate social media policies by posting facility policy information.

Have you tried emailing nurse managers of other facilities in your organization? Not only would this be a professional and verifiable manner of obtaining information, it means you would also have accurate information. You can also look at recommendations from professional organizations.

[mochikat]

Thanks Rose_Queen, just want to throw it out there that people can PM me if they prefer. I do not need to know whether or not they work at the hospital. I just want to know if anyone happens to know of any organizations that have moved away from secondary medications altogether. This can be public knowledge - I do not need to know policies specifically. I just would appreciate a point in the right direction as I have been calling and emailing many facilities and I know there are probably only a handful that have gone piggyback-less. If I have names of hospitals, then at that point I can focus my efforts on contacting the CNS's at those locations for further detail. In Canada, pediatric hospitals have done away with secondary medications altogether. Thanks in advance for any information people can provide!

[MunoRN, RN]

I don't know how intermittent infusions could be done away with, does that mean they no longer give patients antibiotics?

Once a secondary tubing is connected to the primary there is no reason for there to be a clamp on the secondary tubing, so what we do is to tape the roller on the clamp so that it can't be closed.

[Oceanpacific]

I don't think you will get many takers either. You are going to be able to link user names with their facility. The things you are asking about are very specific and are not public information. Even a PM involves giving you this identifiable information.

For a quality management issue, I don't see how "benchmarking" will help out. Just because everyone else is or isn't doing something doesn't mean that they are right or that you are right.

If your facility has had some bad outcomes you should work with manufacturers, patient safety and find some evidence based guidelines

Good luck to you.