Irrigation of indwelling urinary catheters.

Patients with chronic indwelling urinary catheters were studied to determine whether or not catheter irrigation with a sterile nonbacteriostatic solution should be part of routine care. One thousand catheter days were studied with catheters irrigated half of the time. Irrigation was found to be a costly and time-consuming procedure which had no effect on the patients' clinical course except to decrease the incidence of catheter plugging.