Catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) are preventable complications of hospitalization. An interdisciplinary team developed a curriculum to increase awareness of the presence of indwelling urinary catheters (IUCs) in hospitalized patients, addressed practical, primarily nurse-controlled inpatient risk-reduction interventions, and promoted the use of the IUC labels (“tags”). Five thirty-minute educational sessions were cycled over three daily nursing shifts on two inpatient medical floors over a 1-year period; participants were surveyed to elicit feedback and provide real-time insight on the learning objectives. Nurse self-reported IUC tagging was early and sustained; after the IUC tag was introduced, there was a significant increase in tagging reported by the end of the block of educational sessions (from 46.2% to 84.6%, ). Early engagement combined with a targeted educational initiative led to increased knowledge, changes in behavior, and renewed CAUTI awareness in hospitalized patients with IUCs. The processes employed in this small-scale project can be applied to broader, hospitalwide initiatives and to large-scale initiatives for healthcare interventions. As first-line providers with responsibility for the placement and daily maintenance of IUCs, nurses are ideally positioned to implement efforts addressing CAUTIs in the hospital setting. 1. Introduction The presence of an indwelling urinary catheter (IUC) is the principal risk factor for catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI) development. Despite the risk of prolonged catheter placement, few hospitals actively track catheterized patients, and providers are often not aware of the presence of catheters in their patients [1–3]. Nurses are at the frontline of catheter care. As the providers most involved with IUCs in hospitalized patients, nurses are responsible for IUC placement, day-to-day catheter management, and the removal of IUCs. Responsible for specimen collection, nurses play a vital role in the diagnosis of CAUTIs. Among catheterized patients, they are often the first to notice a clinical change or technical problem. Despite their central role in IUC care and management, only a handful of published reports have highlighted the role of nurses in the prevention of CAUTI. The majority of these publications have followed a quality improvement (QI) approach, at times bundled with hospital-wide policy changes [4–7]. In a recent paper by Drekonja et al. an Internet survey demonstrated inconsistent catheter-related knowledge among nurses [6]. However, reeducation of
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