Discuss and Consider Improving Surveillance of Device Association and Device Day Recording

[Brar]

While working on the reference report I had an idea how we can improve the methods surrounding vascular catheter association of sepsis.

Currently if a patient has both, a CVC and a PVC when a sepsis occurs, we ask our partners to record the sepsis as CVC-associated because we consider the CVC as the device with the higher sepsis risk.
While this assumption is probably true it would not add any additional work to record these cases as associated to both CVC and PVC by adding a fourth category "CVC- and PVC-associated".
This way we can assemble information about infections associated to both devices without adding a relevant amount of workload.
The four categories in the dropdown would then be:

1. Not device-associated
2. PVC-associated
3. CVC-associated
4. PVC- and CVC-associated

For the device day recording we could add a "Any vascular catheter" row to the patient progress chart so that we can calculate the time during which any (CVC, PVC or both) vascular catheter was present.
We already do this for antibiotics where we have the "Antibiotic days (total)" as well as the substance specific antibiotic days.

Regarding respiratory support association and respiratory support days we could do the same which would also lead to a better alignment of the device related methods beecause we could get rid of the 12h rule we apply when assessing respiratory support days.