Indwelling urinary catheter surveillance using a Task-oriented nurse acuity system.

The task-oriented nurse acuity system (TONAS) has long been used to calculate nursing care needs on hospital patient units, and include nursing documentation on indwelling urinary catheter use. We performed a 2500-patient validation study of our organization's TONAS, which demonstrated high interrater reliability with manual audits (κ >0.92). For institutions that continue to rely on manual surveillance of urinary catheter use, a TONAS may represent a reliable method of automated surveillance.