Blood cultures - do they make a difference to patient management?
Blood cultures are an expensive test, and optimising the pathway requires considerable effort and commitment. Is it worth the trouble? We looked at 102 consecutive episodes of bacteraemia with clinical details in microbiology system, excluding contaminants and deduplicated to see how it affected patient management. To spoil the ending, these are the conclusions : Conclusions A positive blood culture significantly altered management in 72/102 cases of significant bacteraemia This was on the basis of Gram stain 27 cases Culture 25 cases ...