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, NPD-BC, CRNI
Lynn Hadaway Associates, Inc.
PO Box 10
Milner, GA 30257
Website http://www.hadawayassociates.com
Office Phone 770-358-7861