MARK WAITE / PVT Above, Desert View Hospital Clinical Laboratory Manager Henry Pfiester in the clinical lab. At left, Desert View phlebotomist Linda Catrone-Stull examines lab samples. Pfiester said saving money by not having sufficient phlebotomists may be penny wise but pound foolish where blood cultures are concerned. Advertisement

There won't be any awards presented or other hoopla, but Desert View Hospital Clinical Laboratory Manager Henry Pfiester thought it was something well worth boasting about.

"We've gone a whole year without a single contaminant in our blood cultures, which is almost unheard of in any hospital situation," Pfiester said.

The accidental contamination of blood cultures can lengthen hospital stays by 24 to 48 hours as lab technicians try to identify the contaminant, he said.

It also costs the hospital about $3,000 for each contaminated sample, because patients can't be billed for that extra stay.

Nationwide, the false positive or contamination rate is probably 5 percent, Pfiester said. He estimated Desert View Hospital, which has phlebotomists on duty 24 hours per day, runs probably 100 to 150 blood culture draws per month, which would ordinarily mean five or six patients every month would receive false positive results.

"We just wanted the town to know in any other situation, when they draw out blood cultures, a lot of them are drawn by nurses who are not that highly trained in doing blood draws and invariably they wind up contaminating some of them," Pfiester said.

"When they start doing the blood culture that comes up looking as if the blood culture is positive for pathogens and until they do the identification of the organism the patient cannot be released from the hospital," he said.

"Our policy here is the nurses can draw (blood) for routine labs but only the phlebotomist draws blood cultures. The phlebotomists are very highly trained and really pay attention to what they're doing when they draw these blood cultures."

Previously, Pfiester said the best record he saw was a hospital able to draw blood cultures for two months without a contaminant.

Before he came to Pahrump, Pfiester said he worked at North Vista Hospital in Las Vegas on a blood culture contamination project. He was able to reduce the contaminant rate there from 6 percent to 5 percent after six months.

"There's a way that the skin has to be cleaned. You use iodine instead of alcohol and the iodine has to be put on in a very specific, circular manner and they have to really take their time when they're doing it," Pfiester said.

Many hospitals choose to save money by not having enough phlebotomists, a decision Pfiester said was penny wise and pound foolish.

"That's not a reflection on the nurses, it's just that they have so many other things that they're doing that they don't have time to really pay attention to fine detail in doing the blood cultures," he said.