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Blood Culture Collection

Best Practices for Laboratory Professionals

This CME/CMLE-accredited, case-based activity is designed to help phlebotomists and other clinical laboratory team members increase their knowledge, skills, and competence in applying best practices for adult blood culture collection in clinical laboratories. Through a series of ten 5-minute cases developed by a multidisciplinary team, you will gain a greater understanding of current guidelines to improve blood culture collection practices to maintain aseptic technique, reduce blood culture contamination rates, ensure patient safety, and contribute to timeliness and accuracy of patient diagnosis and treatment.

Note: While these best practices represent the current gold standard for blood culture collection, they may need to be modified based on institutional guidelines in light of supply disruptions in blood culture media bottles or other consumables.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:

1

Outline step-wise best practices for adult blood culture collection.

2

Improve workflows to mitigate risk of blood culture contamination.

3

Calculate blood culture contamination rate.

4

Understand the value of tracking and providing feedback on blood culture contamination rates.

This Case-based Learning Includes the Following Topics:

  • Appropriate use of aerobic and anaerobic blood culture bottles
  • Recommended blood volume for adult blood culture collection
  • Proper disinfection procedures prior to blood culture collection
  • Best practices to reduce risk of blood culture contamination
  • Blood culture contamination rate calculation and monitoring

The activity offers 1.0 CME/CMLE credit.

How to Register

To register for this course, you need an ASCP account for the ASCP Store. If you don’t have one, click the button below to create a free account.
After obtaining a free ASCP account, register for the course using the following instructions:
  1. Follow this direct link to the Blood Culture Collection Best Practices for Laboratory Professionals course page on the ASCP store
  2. Add the class to the cart
  3. Click the Checkout button
  4. Click the “I’m not a robot” button
  5. Click the Submit button
  6. You will see a screen that says Home and My Account, click on My Account
  7. On the My Account page, there’s a section that says My Education, click on the blue button that says My Courses
  8. You’ll see a list of courses on the next page that you are registered for
  9. Click the button that says Launch or Start next to the name of the course
  10. Then you will be taken to the LMS to start the class
  11. Following completion of the course, course credit will be visible on the Dashboard page, under the section that says My Education, and the button that says Certificates & Transcript

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