Curos caps for foleys?

Nurses General Nursing

Updated:   Published

I work in a Neuro ICU and we have had a huge problem with CAUTI this year. Our hospital hired some outside infection control person to come over see our unit and one other. One of the new things they added was placing curos caps on the sampling port. The IC person is no longer overseeing the unit and we recently established volunteers from the unit to continue the education. I have been trying to research this and I can not for the life of me find anything to support this practice.

Is anyone else doing this at thier hospital? Or can point me to some research.

I have used CINAHL and basic Google but no luck.

TIA

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My hospital adopted this practice as well. They audit to make sure each foley has a curos cap in place.

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Specializes in Oncology.

We never formally adapted it but I always did it in my patients because I would go hog wild curosing anything luer lock connected to my patient. It can't hurt?

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I agree that it feels like it can't hurt. My problem is that I am trying to put together education for our unit to understand why we do things so maybe we can have a higher compliance. I feel like if people understand the 'why', they do it cause they want to not because they have to.

I haven't seen any research on this subject and wanted to see if others are practicing this. I guess if I cant find any soon I might have to figure out how to do the research myself. :)

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ICUman said:
My hospital adopted this practice as well. They audit to make sure each foley has a curos cap in place.

Thanks for the input. Do you feel like it has helped?

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Specializes in Oncology.

It's for the same reason you use them on IVs. There's a physical barrier there to prevent bacteria from entering and port into the body. When you want to access it to get a culture you're protecting against inadequate swabbing with alcohol at that time.

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Specializes in Varied.

We recently stopped using curos caps, so it may be hard to find research in this area as clinical practice is changing.

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inthecosmos said:
We recently stopped using curos caps, so it may be hard to find research in this area as clinical practice is changing.

That's interesting. Do you know what the reason is? My cynical side tells me it would be budget related.

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inthecosmos said:
We recently stopped using curos caps, so it may be hard to find research in this area as clinical practice is changing.

That's interesting. Do you know what the reason is? My cynical side tells me it would be budget related.

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dawdlingsquid said:
That's interesting. Do you know what the reason is? My cynical side tells me it would be budget related.

We trialed them for use on our CVADs and ultimately didn't adopt them as their use had no impact on our CLABSI rate.

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Specializes in Critical care.

We never used them on foleys, our CAUTI rates are super low already, one thing we do is change out foleys before getting a UA though. I guess the thought is that a new foley won't be colonized, which our ID nurse assures us is not related to the patient being infected ......

Cheers

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Do many of your Foley patients need UA's? Is q12h Foley care actually being done?

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