The Importance of CVAD Care and Maintenance

Objectives:

1. Discuss why proactive CVAD care is so important

2. Review why nurses should routinely assess for CVAD patency

3. Explore a program that includes patency and competency checks to help improve proactive CVAD care and maintenance your hospital

Speaker: Nadine Nakazawa, BS, RN, VA-BC

Sponsored by our friends at Genentech

A little about Nadine:

Nadine has been involved in the vascular access arena for most of her nursing career.  She was fortunate to know Suzanne Herbst in the 1980's and was invited to participate in an interest group on vascular access devices that soon became BAVAN in 1985.  Since that time she has participated in BAVAN, then NAVAN beginning in 1990, and now AVA.  Nadine has consistently attended and participated in the AVA national conference for many years.  She currently works as a Vascular Access Specialist at Stanford Health in Palo Alto, California.  She started the PICC program there in 1990.  She has participated in the VAD committee since 1983, and chaired that committee for 14 years until 2007.  She teaches maintenance care and complication management of CVADs courses locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.  Nadine also teaches courses on PICC insertion using ultrasound. 

(The focus of the Suzanne LaVere Herbst Award for Excellence in Vascular Access is on interventions that promote optimal outcomes for individuals requiring vascular access.

The award publicly recognizes an individual who has made a substantial contribution to vascular access practice by improving patient outcomes and/or contributing to the science of vascular access.  The accompanying lectureship and publication of the recipient’s work in the Journal of the Association for Vascular Access (JAVA) establishes a standard of achievement in the specialty of vascular access.)