What Should We Do?: Butterfly overuse
by Dennis Ernst • September 01, 2016
Question: Are there benchmarks on the percentage of straight vs butterfly needles that should be used? We'd like to see how we compare on in-house patients, outpatients, and nursing home usage. We conducted a study here that found 57% of draws were done using butterflies. Once people were aware and conscious of the issue, we were able to improve our numbers. We don't want to have to sign out butterfly needles yet as they do in other places. Do you have any ideas or tricks you can suggest to help us keep the rate dropping?
Our response: We are not aware of any national statistics on butterfly usage overall, much less on specific patient populations. We've conducted numerous surveys, however, and wrote many articles on the topic in this newsletter. (See links below.) We feel your 57% is high for an acute care facility. It's hard to believe most of your patients require them. You are to be commended for taking steps to get the rate down, as it is a hugely expensive problem.
Assume you pay 20 cents for every tube holder/needle assembly and $1.25 for every butterfly set. For every phlebotomist who uses a butterfly when a tube holder assembly would suffice, you lose $1.05.
Now assume your phlebotomists average 6 patients per hour throughout the day. For an 8-hour day, that's 48 patients. If they're using butterfly sets on half the patients, and only half of them actually require it, it's costing your facility $12.60 per person for every 8-hour shift. Multiply that by the number of shifts and the number of phlebotomists at your facility, and over the course of a year you're burning through $5000 unnecessarily. Plug in your own numbers, but it's easy to find that butterfly overuse costs the average employer hundreds of dollars every day, and tens of thousands every year. Ouch.
You've probably already taken some of these steps, but we recommend bringing everyone together and articulate the problem in resource management you are experiencing, and how its crippling your facility. (Don't be afraid to mention how perpetuating butterfly overuse prevents administration from approving raises and benefit packages.) Let them know they are the collective solution, and you really need their help. The team, management included, have to feel this is only conquerable as a team. No individuals are exempt.
Set your benchmark, then set incremental goals, and your overall goal. Be ambitious and aggressive. Report progress, or lack thereof, toward the goal weekly from the outset, then monthly once you're getting good traction. Just like hemolysis and blood culture contamination, this is about process improvement, and the effort never ends. Above all, reward your team early and often when progress is made. Without it, your efforts will be futile.
[Editor's note: each year, one of the most highly acclaimed presentations at the Phlebotomy Supervisor's Boot Camp is the "Squandered Resources and Low Hanging Fruit" presentation where we articulate strategies in detail to reduce butterfly overuse, hemolysis rates and blood culture contamination rates.]
Related articles appear in these back issues of Phlebotomy Today-STAT!:
Got a challenging phlebotomy situation or work-related question? Email us your submission at [email protected] and you just might see it as a future case study. (Names and identifiers will be removed to assure anonymity.)
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