ENFit Connectors – Changes to Enteral Feeding Connectors

Coming in 2015

To Healthcare Organizations –

As you may be aware, to reduce the risk of tubing misconnections, enteral feeding device connectors are changing. The purpose of this change is to increase the safety of enteral feedings.

Past misconnections include incidents such as an enteral feeding set connected to a central venous catheter, or an enteral feeding set connected to a hemodialysis line. As you can imagine, one of these misconnections could be fatal. There are many possibilities for potentially dangerous misconnections.

Many separate organizations have come together to reduce the risk of enteral tubing misconnections. These organizations have created the Global Enteral Device Supplier Association GEDSA, www.StayConnected2015.org

Enteral feeding connections will change in 2015. If you feed patients or clients by enteral means you will be affected by this change.

There are many resources available to you to make this change easier. Here are some of the questions you may want to answer in order to be prepared for the product conversion:

How do I organize this effort?

o  Organize a Steering Committee for your institution. The Steering Committee will be the organizing body for the ENFit tubing conversion.

Who should be on that committee?

Nursing / Dietary / Nutrition / Nursing Education
Patient Safety / Risk Management / Pharmacy
Technology Management / Information Management / Supply Chain Management
Allied Patient Care Staff / EMS / Dialysis

Biomed Liaisons to Home Health, LTC, & Practices / Clinics

Others as needed

When do I need to start the process?

o  Right away. The new products have received 510(k) approval and are in production. While the exact date when the old products will no longer be available isn’t known, it will be sometime in the first Quarter of 2015.

What resources are available?

o  There are several excellent resources available. They are listed at the end of this letter. More information is available from your vendor for Enteral Tubing and related products.

Who will educate our staff?

o  You will be responsible for the education of your staff. Vendors will provide access to information and Webinars, but they will not be available to in-service staff.

What’s the best way to organize this process?

o  There are checklists available on the GEDSA website. You can use them as a draft process and alter them as appropriate.

Who needs to know about the conversion?

o  Use the knowledge of the Steering Committee to decide who needs to be informed and to what extent.

Who will the conversion affect?

o  The areas that the Steering Committee covers are the primary areas, but they may not be the only ones. Decide with the Steering Committee who will be affected by the conversion.

When will we have to convert from the old tubing?

o  There will be a window of time, rather than a specific date. The window will occur when the manufacturers are phasing out the old tubing and the new tubing is available in appropriate quantities.

When will the new enteral feeding tubing be available?

o  We don’t know exactly, but we will have some advance notice, probably at least a month.

What’s an overview of what’s going to happen?

o  The enteral feeding tube conversion to the ENFit tubing is the first step in a three step process. The second step is the conversion of enteral feeding syringes to the new connectors. The third step is to convert the administration sets to accept the new connections.

o  When the enteral feeding connection conversions are complete, the process will go on to other applications that are subject to misconnection. The entire process will go on for some years.

Resources that may be helpful to you:

All resources are available at the Healthy NH website: http://healthynh.com/index.php/isotubing.html

www.Stayconnected2015.org . This is the website of GEDSA, a central organization in the effort to reduce tubing misconnections. The website contains videos, a “Stay Connected” in-service, an initiative overview, and a FAQ sheet. This website can be your primary source for ongoing information about reducing tubing misconnections.

www.aami.org/hottopics/connectors/index.html . The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation has information on tubing connectors.

www.jointcommission.org/ . Search for Sentinel Event Alert 53:Managing risk during transition to new ISO tubing connector standards, and Sentinel Event Alert, Issue 36: Tubing misconnections—a persistent and potentially deadly occurrence.