Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Our objective was to determine the utility of urine dipstick test for the screening of urinary tract infection in catheterized women following gynecological surgeries. METHODS: This was a descriptive study carried out in a tertiary care centre. Five hundred post-operative women were enrolled in the study whose urine samples were collected under sterile precautions from their catheters and simultaneously subjected to the dipstick test at the bed side of the patient and submitted to the laboratory for semi-quantitative culture and microscopy. Data were expressed as proportion. The results of the culture, microscopic examination, and the dipstick test were analyzed using Chi-square test. RESULTS: When culture results were compared with the leukocyte esterase (LE) test and the nitrite reduction (NR) test, the P value obtained was <0.0001, respectively. Sensitivity was 88.24, 85.29, and 87.88 %, respectively, for the LE test, NR test, and when both these tests were combined. The specificity for the LE test and the combination were, respectively, 98.46 % while for the NR test was 96.71 %. The positive predictive value decreased from 81.08 to 80.56 % on combining the tests while the negative value remained unchanged at 99.11 %. CONCLUSIONS: These bedside tests could considerably reduce the laboratory workload and allow important clinical decisions to be made early.