Urinary Tract Infections Not Only Concerned With Catheter Use
One of hospital medicine’s premiere experts on urinary catheter use says that even though UTIs might be the main catheter issue with which hospitalists concern themselves, it’s just one of the issues to be thinking about when caring for patients with the devices.
“Non-infectious complications—trauma during time of insertion, pain, discomfort, hematuria after catheter removal—are also very important issues that a hospitalist needs to be aware of, even though we tend not to track those issues as closely as infections related to the catheter,” says Sanjay Saint, MD, MPH, FHM, hospitalist and professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Often, there’s no easy way to know whether a patient might have sustained some injury at the time of insertion, because it’s not noted anywhere how many attempts at insertion there were. So it takes extra care to take that into account.
Simply having a catheter can lead to some problems that hospitalists usually try to prevent, he said.
“The catheter tethers the patient to the bed and acts as a one-point restraint,” says Dr. Saint, who many years ago co-wrote an article on the topic.4 “So it prevents them from getting up and out of bed, increasing the risk for venous thromboembolism [and] pressure sores, and the de-conditioning may lead to falls.”
A urinary catheter alone is not a recipe for bed rest.
“The patient could still get up and out of bed, but there needs to be close attention paid to the drainage bag and making sure that the drainage bag is kept below the bladder to prevent the reflux of urine into the bladder,” he says.
It’s similar to the recognition that ICU and hip-replacement patients benefit from early mobilization.
“We just have to be mindful of making sure that we do good catheter and drainage bag maintenance so that it minimizes the risk of infection,” Dr. Saint says.
Tom Collins is a freelance writer in South Florida.
