Kudos to Ryan Shaw and his entire team for the submission of their Duke CTSI application entitled: "Line Snugglers: Central Venous Catheter Line Covers." This proposal requests funding for a one-year period with a start date of May 1, 2018. 

Critically ill patients often have many therapeutic connections at the bedside that can easily become disorganized and tangled – known as ‘spaghetti syndrome.’ This can lead to contamination, physical harm to patients, nurses’ confusion, and a physical hazard that increases the risk of falls for both nurses and patients.

Recently, a nurse in the Duke Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant (PBMT) Unit invented a product named “Line Snugglers” to protect double/triple lumen central venous lines connected to intravenous (IV) tubing for medication delivery from contamination and entanglement. Initially developed for pediatric patients admitted to the PBMT unit, we have quickly come to realize that these devices can be used across intensive care and step-down units, oncology units, or where patients are connected to multiple IVs for many hours. Line Snugglers have a market in hospitals not only across Duke, but also across the nation. Currently, no such product is widely used in standard nursing care. Line Snugglers are ready to become standard of practice. However, this will require a scientific clinical trial to provide evidence for their use and safety, as well as FDA approval for marketing.

Line Snugglers have the full support of the Chief of the Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Unit for our pilot trial, and support from DUHS Nursing and School of Nursing leadership to work towards scalability across Duke Health. We are seeking additional funds through the CTSI Translational Accelerator Research funding opportunity for the following: 1) to expand our study to include adult care units across the medical center (N=150); 2) support project management; 3) fund materials and manufacturing; and 4) to generate data that will allow us to accelerate this invention into practice and commercialization.