Clinical expert consensus statement on best practices in the cardiac catheterization laboratory: Society for cardiovascular angiography and interventions

The cardiac catheterization laboratory (CCL) is a setting in which elective, urgent, and emergent percutaneous procedures are performed. This poses challenges to maintaining and prioritizing high quality care and patient safety. Nonetheless, process expectations of a high-quality CCL include appropriate periprocedural communication, clinical management, documentation, and universal protocol. Regulations primarily targeted at open surgical operating rooms have the potential to negatively impact care because they may mandate focus on performance measures that are not necessarily relevant to the cardiac catheterization laboratory. For example, routine site marking for percutaneous access is irrelevant for most patients since failure to obtain access on one side (e.g., right femoral artery) simply leads to attempting access on the other side (e.g., left femoral artery). Instead, directives should be tailored to the percutaneous procedure setting to assure quality and optimal patient safety. This document will therefore provide expert consensus opinion on a number of issues pertaining to ‘‘best practices’’ within the CCL, focusing on quality and safety during each step of the process. The writing committee acknowledges a dearth in high-quality published studies in this area, making many of the enclosed recommendations based primarily on expert consensus. Although references are provided when available, further research specifically in catheterization laboratory processes and quality improvement is needed. The document is divided into ‘‘best practices’’ that should be performed during the preprocedure, intraprocedure, and postprocedure settings for diagnostic cardiac catheterization and coronary intervention, to be consistent with the typical patient flow into and out of the CCL. Despite the long history of cardiac catheterization that dates back several decades, a document describing these ‘‘best practices’’ has not yet been written. The purpose of this document is not to represent all acceptable practices, but to provide consensus opinion on what would currently be considered ‘‘best practices’’ as future goals for catheterization laboratories.