Podcast 776: Single-Site Blood Cultures

Contributor: Aaron Lessen, MD

Educational Pearls:

• Traditionally, blood cultures are drawn from two separate sites despite no data to suggest this is better than drawing blood from one site
• Recent study evaluated multi-site versus single-site blood cultures to determine if there was a difference in accuracy or contamination
• Positive yield was 20% in the single-site year and 17% in the multi-site year
• No difference in contamination between the two groups

References

Ekwall-Larson A, Yu D, Dinnétz P, Nordqvist H, Özenci V. Single-Site Sampling versus Multisite Sampling for Blood Cultures: a Retrospective Clinical Study. J Clin Microbiol. 2022;60(2):e0193521. doi:10.1128/JCM.01935-21

Summarized by John Spartz, MS4 | Edited by Erik Verzemnieks, MD

The Emergency Medical Minute is excited to announce that we are now offering AMA PRA Category 1 credits™ via online course modules. To access these and for more information, visit our website at https://emergencymedicalminute.org/cme-courses/ and create an account.

Donate to EMM today!