“Spending money where it matters..”

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I suspect the next revolution in diagnostic bacteriology will be (routine) rapid identification of bacteria from blood cultures which have flagged positive on blood culture analysers.

Fluorescent In-Situ Hybridsation (FISH) technology along with Maldi-TOF sepsityper, now allows us to identify the causative bacterium accurately in the majority of cases within an hour of the blood culture becoming positive. This has obvious positive clinical implications, particularly if the identified bacterium is a beta-haemolytic streptococcus, a Pseudomonas aeruginosa or a Staphylococcus aureus. Even rapidly identifying coagulase negative staphylococci may avert the need for unnecssary anti-microbial therapy.

These technologies are NOT cost-prohibitive, and should be within the scope and skill level of most reasonably sized diagnostic laboratories.

I believe it will be only a matter of time before it becomes unacceptable to wait for the bacterium to grow on agar plates before identifying it.

I think these technologies also have implications for how the microbiology lab operates overnight. If we can identify the organism within one hour then is it really acceptable to leave a positive blood culture unattended to in an analyser for 8-12 hours overnight? (This definitely still happens in many diagnostic laboratories..)

With these new technologies becoming commonplace, maybe it is time to re-think how we use our budgets and how we roster the microbiology staff. Maybe we need to divert the money used to work-up bacteria from peri-anal abscesses and chronic venous ulcers towards rapid identification of bacteria from positive blood cultures, where it is going to make a real clinical difference and be potentially life-saving.

…and maybe the blood culture analyser needs to be staffed 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, with blood cultures being processed and bacteria identified as soon as possible.

These sort of changes might cause a few grumbles but this is the sort of direction we need to be heading in, in order to have a clinical microbiology service that makes a genuine difference to the patient…

Michael

p.s. In future, any links from the articles will be highlighted in purple, to avoid confusion

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