Hello!
Can you please share with how you validate that the staff on your PICC team are remaining competent.
We are maintaing a log of all insertions, identifying successful and unsuccessful procedures and then coming up with a % of successful insertions. We created a goal of %80 to maintain the validation of competency. If we had a PICC team member who falls below that percentage we would need to monitor and provide intervention.
There is something that concerns me with this method.
There are patients that for any number of reasons the PICC line is unable to successfully be inserted. This is not because of the skill of the PICC team member, but the anatomy etc of the patient. On the log we collect this yearly data, we could present an area for comments to filter these difficult or unsuccessful cases out, but I wanted to be sure I am not missing something and perhaps there is a bnetter method to judge this competency.
Thanks for your comments.
Mary
How do you confirm that the problem was actually anatomy? What did the nurse do to work around the issue as it presents itself? For instance was tip placed in jugular with patient on ventilator with pressures preventing it from passing into SVC? Or did nurse simply pass the PICC too fast or without correct positioning and it ended up in jugular? If the nurse took the appropriate steps to move the catheter to the correct position or did they simply assume it was anatomy and give up on the procedure? All of that is part of competency assessment.
Lynn Hadaway, M.Ed., RN, NPD-BC, CRNI
Lynn Hadaway Associates, Inc.
PO Box 10
Milner, GA 30257
Website http://www.hadawayassociates.com
Office Phone 770-358-7861