How much blood (mL) do you, as a clinician, want to see aspirated before deeming a catheter patient?
How much fluid infused, if any, would you want to see infused before a VAD was deemed patient?
Would your numbers stated above change if you just did successful catheter clearance on the VAD using a clearance agent?
Thanks in advance for your responses.....
There is no way to answer this based on sound evidence. So it would always be a judgment call. If the blood return was easy to obtain, free-flowing, and the color and appearance of normal venous blood, I would then assess any difficulty with manual flushing from a 10 mL syringe. With blood return meeting that criteria plus no resistance to the manual flush, I woiuld judge the catheter to be open and patent. If the blood return was not the normal color and/or appearance (pink-tinged, etc), or it was difficult to withdraw or the return changed if the patient moved in any way, I would continue to assess by flushing the line with the 10 mL syringe to determine those characteristics. So I don't think decision would come down to a quantity but rather the quality of what was seen and felt. Just my opinion.
Lynn Hadaway, M.Ed., RN, CRNI
Lynn Hadaway Associates, Inc.
PO Box 10
Milner, GA 30257
Website http://www.hadawayassociates.com
Office Phone 770-358-7861