I could rant about this all day; I would guess that it is more about pleasing JCO than science.

When I was in nurse "residency" lol, they told us research at the NIH or CDC showed that IV tubing only needs to be changed every 7 days for infection control, not every 4 days which is standard everywhere. However, they said we're just going to keep doing it every 4 days until some place like Hopkins starts doing it every 7.

They also said that it took turn teams in nursing homes 2 hours to turn every resident, which is where the standard of q2 turns came from. Immobile patients definitely need to be turned, but I doubt doing it exactly every 2 hours prevents pressure injuries. Probably more important that they are not laying in stool or urine. I'm not waking these people up every 2 hours at night in the ICU, but I certainly have to chart that they were turned q2, same as completely independent patients.

It really seems that nursing comes up with these policies. I think most people I work with take them as suggestions/guidelines, but there are always a few hardliners that will write you up in an instant.

Always funny to see a nurse yell at the crusty old vascular surgery attending to after they walk into a patient's room without a gown because the patient had MRSA during their admission 7 years ago.