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Showing posts from March, 2019

Use of Peezy device to try to improve quality of urine culture

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Background Urine cultures are often contaminated, making interpretation difficult. Pure growths may often not reflect infection and may be due to contamination - in our lab only one third of pure growths from pregnant women are reproducible.  In pre-op urines mixed growths make optimising prophylactic antibiotics difficult. We often end up giving broad spectrum antibiotics to cover all the organisms in a mixture as there is insufficient time to get a repeat. Alternatively, multi-resistant organisms may not be covered adequately. For patients with bacteraemia from a urinary source, many have a mixture in their urine culture. This compromises early rationalisation of antibiotic therapy. The Peezy has been designed to try to improve the quality of urine specimens by automatically discarding the beginning and end of the urine sample. In 2018 we trialled its use in pre-operative patients. These are the results. Number of patients The Peezy was used for both orthopaedic and