Microbiology News Update – Minor changes to Urine Culture Methodology
As part of our commitment to continually improve our diagnostic capacity, we are making some changes to urine culture to bring us into line with the National Standard Methods (NSM).
Please continue to use the PHE Urinary Tract Infection guideline when evaluating patients with potential UTIs (though this is being updated shortly)
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/619772/Urinary_tract_infection_UTI_guidance.pdf
The changes are:
- Introduction of chromogenic agar to improve our identification of urinary coliforms.
- We are limiting our confirmatory testing for resistance markers. These 2 changes will enable us to issue more results at ~ 24 hours.
- Alteration to the cut-offs used to define significant bacteriuria in line with NSM. This will mean you will see different colony counts on the results; we will still only report significant bacteriuria. The advice on whether to treat remains unchanged (i.e. Treat SYMPTOMATIC cases only except in pregnancy)
- We have amended the electronic ordering – hopefully the questions are now more relevant and easier to complete (GP Ordercoms will be available in the next 12 months).
- You do not need to add the result of a dipstick to the request, but please include planned and previous antibiotic therapy in the clinical details, so we can tailor our result to your patient.
We are always pleased to receive feedback (good and bad) so please contact me if you want to discuss these changes.
Cressida Auckland, Consultant Medical Microbiologist
cressida.auckland@nhs.net
