Prevalence of Positive Blood Cultures in the Emergency Department of a Tertiary Hospital: A Retrospective Single-Centre Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Blood cultures (BCs) are frequently ordered during the course of investigation in emergency departments (EDs). However, there are few studies examining the clinical value of BCs and the prevalence of positive BCs in the adult ED. Methods: This was a retrospective study conducted by reviewing patient charts to obtain all BCs collected in our ED over the course of one year. Out of 214,566 ED visits over the period from 1 July 2021 to 30 June 2022, a total of 1034 blood cultures were collected. The study was conducted in the ED of a teaching hospital in Taif, Makkah Region, Saudi Arabia, that has 500 beds for adults. Results: The most commonly isolated organisms were Staphylococcus hominis (19.8%), Staphylococcus epidermidis (14.1%), Escherichia coli (9%), Klebsiella pneumoniae (8%), Staphylococcus capitis (7.3%), and Staphylococcus aureus (5.6%). Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa were isolated from 3.4% and 1.1% of positive blood cultures, respectively. In the context of antimicrobial sensitivity, the organisms isolated from positive BCs in this study showed the highest sensitivity to vancomycin (57.6%). This was followed by levofloxacin (48.6%), linezolid (48%), gentamycin (41.8%), amoxicillin clavulanate (39.5%), and clindamycin (39%). The highest prevalence of antimicrobial resistance was to ampicillin (42.4%). Resistance to clindamycin, azithromycin, piperacillin-tazobactam, and imipenem was 22%, 8.5%, 3.4% and 0.6%, respectively. Conclusion: The prevalence of positive blood cultures in the ED of this tertiary hospital was high. The most commonly isolated organisms were Staphylococcus hominis, Staphylococcus epidermidis, Escherichia coli, and Klebsiella pneumoniae. Vancomycin elicited the highest antimicrobial sensitivity, followed by levofloxacin.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".