Current practice on the management of pre-operative urine dipstick results in women undergoing gynaecological surgery in Wales

Abstract

A survey was circulated to consultant gynaecologists across Wales, to evaluate the management of pre-operative urine dipstick results. Questions were based on NICE guideline 171, regarding the management of urinary incontinence in women. Six respondents never checked their patient's urine dipstick results. Of the remaining 37 respondents, 70% always check and 30% sometimes check. Overall, 37.1% cancelled surgery when a urine dipstick was positive for either nitrite or leukocyte-esterase (LE). A significantly larger proportion cancelled surgery when symptomatic for urinary tract infection (p< 0.001), and when nitrite and LE positive compared to only LE positive (p< 0.05).

This survey provides evidence that gynaecological operations are potentially being cancelled unnecessarily based on a screening test with limited sensitivity and specificity. Further research is needed into the outcomes of gynaecological surgery in women symptomatic of urinary tract infection to provide guidance on the use of pre-operative urinalysis and the management of test results.

Impact statement

• What is already known on this subject? The strongest risk factor for postoperative urinary tract infections (UTIs) is a pre-operative recurrent UTI (Nygaard et al. 2011). This is the reason behind the urine dipstick being part of the pre-operative checklist for gynaecological surgery. Traditionally, a suspected UTI would mean postphoning surgery whilst treating the UTI. It is known that the sensitivity of the nitrite test and leukocyte-esterase test when used alone is low and cannot rule out UTI in most patients (Mambatta et al. 2015). Urine culture is therefore suggested for all patients with a suspected UTI (John et al. 2006). To our knowledge, there are no data available on whether we should be postphoning gynaecological surgery based on a urine dipstick result.

• What the results of this study add? Overall, 37.1% of respondents cancelled surgery when a pre-operative urine dipstick was positive for either nitrite or leukocyte-esterase. This provides evidence of variation in the practice of using the urine dipstick in women undergoing gynaecological surgery in Wales. These cancellations are potentially unnecessarily. Furthermore, 14% of respondents did not use a urine dipstick and the majority did not act on an abnormal results, implying clinicians have a low confidence in the test as a screening tool.

• What the implications are of these findings for clinical practice and/or further research? We propose removing the urine dipstick as a pre-operative screening test. Asymptomatic bacteriuria is common in women and routine screening for UTI pre-operatively will therefore inevitably lead to unnecessary intervention (i.e. cancellation). Further research is needed into the outcomes of gynaecological surgery in women symptomatic of UTI to be able to provide guidance on the use of pre-operative urinalysis and management of the test results.

Keywords:

• Urinalysis
• urine dipstick
• urine microscopy
• urine tract infections
• gynaecological surgery cancellations

Acknowledgements

SW and KB designed the study, collected and analysed the data and drafted the article. GE and SC conceived the study and revised the article for intellectual content. All of the authors approved the version for publication. A statistician, Chris Edwards, helped with the statistical analysis.

Disclosure statement

There are no conflicting interests to disclose for this study.