School of Medicine and Health Sciences Poster Presentations

Vancomycin Trough Quality Improvement Project: Aiming to improve correctly timed troughs

Document Type

Poster

Keywords

Vancomycin; trough; quality; dosing

Publication Date

Spring 2017

Abstract

Vancomycin is one of the most widely used intravenous antibiotics in the United States for the treatment of severe gram-positive infections, specifically methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Troughs are used to guide dosing of vancomycin in order to maintain a therapeutic concentration (between 15 and 20 mcg/mL) that achieves a steady-state before the administration of the fourth dose. Therefore, a vancomycin trough must be timed just prior to the fourth dose to ensure that a therapeutic steady-state has been achieved. It is important for any medical facility to implement a system to determine whether medications are within their therapeutic window to reduce the risk of such complications. We aim to improve quality of care by increasing the percentage of appropriately timed vancomycin troughs through physician and nursing education. The initial analysis of this project has revealed that only 34% of vancomycin troughs were timed properly on select floors of the university hospital. This demonstrates a large deficit in our aims to provide safe and effective patient care. We hope to show that implementation of a nursing education program on medical wards will lead to a great proportion of appropriately completed vancomycin troughs.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Open Access

1

Comments

Poster to be presented at GW Annual Research Days 2017.

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Vancomycin Trough Quality Improvement Project: Aiming to improve correctly timed troughs

Vancomycin is one of the most widely used intravenous antibiotics in the United States for the treatment of severe gram-positive infections, specifically methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Troughs are used to guide dosing of vancomycin in order to maintain a therapeutic concentration (between 15 and 20 mcg/mL) that achieves a steady-state before the administration of the fourth dose. Therefore, a vancomycin trough must be timed just prior to the fourth dose to ensure that a therapeutic steady-state has been achieved. It is important for any medical facility to implement a system to determine whether medications are within their therapeutic window to reduce the risk of such complications. We aim to improve quality of care by increasing the percentage of appropriately timed vancomycin troughs through physician and nursing education. The initial analysis of this project has revealed that only 34% of vancomycin troughs were timed properly on select floors of the university hospital. This demonstrates a large deficit in our aims to provide safe and effective patient care. We hope to show that implementation of a nursing education program on medical wards will lead to a great proportion of appropriately completed vancomycin troughs.