I’m sure you’ve seen and used one as a common tool to assess clinician skills in a simulated training environment. There are different PIV checklists used by various healthcare facilities but it is difficult to locate validated checklists to measure practicing clinician PIV insertion skill due to a lack of validity and reliability evidence to support the scores obtained by these checklists.

A recent article “Development and Testing of a Short Peripheral Intravenous Catheter (PIVC) Insertion Skills Checklist” states accurately measuring PIVC insertion skill is an integral but missing part of the quality improvement process required to complete a PIVC insertion procedure needs assessment, uncover clinical variation, intervene with appropriate training, and monitor and report on the clinical quality and cost of care outcomes.  Creating a valid, reliable, and generalized checklist to measure PIVC insertion skill is a key step in assessing baseline competence and skill mastery.

The study reported, based on recognized standards and best practices, the PIVC Insertion Skills Checklist was developed to measure all the steps necessary for a best practice PIVC insertion. This includes the entire process from reading the prescriber’s orders to documentation and, if the first attempt is unsuccessful, a second attempt option. Content validity was established using 3 infusion therapy experts.** Evidence in support of response process validity is described. The PIVC Insertion Skills Checklist was used by 8 trained raters to assess the PIVC insertion skills, in a simulated environment, of 63 practicing clinicians working on medical and surgical units in an US teaching hospital.

This study was an attempt to fill the need for a checklist that can accurately and reliably measure PIVC insertion performance. It was created to measure each step of a best practice insertion technique for anyone performing short PIVC insertion. During this study, the checklist demonstrated solid reliability and validity. This study did not measure the ability of the checklist to determine competency, instead, it measured how well procedural performance conformed to practice guidelines. A high checklist score does not rule out incompetence but the addition of a global rating scale would eliminate this checklist weakness.

To view the detailed study results, click here.

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**Disclosure:  I was one of the 3 experts who provided expert opinion and assessment validation feedback for this study and did not receive any compensation for my participation and for this post.