The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) has established itself as a global leader in IV safety by implementing a comprehensive strategy to prevent infiltration and extravasation injuries. The NHS’s commitment to vascular access safety extends to its 570 million patient interactions annually.
To this end, the UK’s National Infusion and Vascular Access Society (NIVAS) published an infiltration and extravasation toolkit to improve safety procedures and protocols last year, and it has been widely adopted throughout the region.
This is a wake-up call to the U.S. healthcare industry. Unlike the U.K., the U.S. lacks a consistent approach to minimizing IV injuries and patient harm. The “wait and see” approach can lead to injury, including nerve damage, amputation, and even death, in extreme cases.
These consequences are dire and utterly preventable and, coupled with underreporting of IV complications, mean we are facing a patient safety crisis in the U.S. And economically, the unseen IV injury epidemic is wreaking havoc as healthcare costs associated with extended hospital stays and ongoing treatment of complications rise unabated.
Luckily, the NIVAS toolkit directly applies to U.S. healthcare providers and can be adopted in this country. The impact of the U.K. approach has been demonstrated through clinical evaluation. At the NHS Frimley Health Foundation Trust hospital, ivWatch’s proprietary monitoring technology implementation revealed that extravasation rates were more than double what was previously estimated. At the same time, ivWatch reduced extravasation injuries by 100% following implementation, improved the accuracy of vascular injury diagnosis, and corrected the misclassification of extravasations.1
The U.S. can and should match the U.K.’s progress in IV safety. Among the steps that should be taken are the designation of extravasation leads within nursing staff and the development and implementation of preventative management (again, the NIVAS toolkit can and should be adopted here).
The evidence from the U.K. demonstrates that a systematic approach to addressing infiltration and extravasation improves patient safety and increases diagnosis efficiency and accuracy. Extravasation injuries are costly and contribute to patient dissatisfaction for hospitals. As awareness of IV injury prevention grows, the U.S. healthcare system has both an opportunity and a responsibility to implement these proven strategies to protect patients from preventable harm.