Company Profile
Association for Vascular Access
Company Overview
The Association for Vascular Access (AVA) is an organization of healthcare professionals founded in 1985 to support and promote the specialty of vascular access. The mission of AVA is to lead healthcare by protecting patients and providers to improve lives. Today, its multidisciplinary membership advances research, provides professional and public education to shape practice and enhance patient outcomes, and partners with the device manufacturing community to bring about evidence-based innovations in vascular access.
Company History
In 1985, Suzanne Herbst, RN, MA, was working as a home infusion clinician in San Francisco, caring for patients and friends with AIDS. She realized that clinicians' knowledge of vascular access and vascular access devices (VADs) varied widely with some knowing very little. She noted that this lack of knowledge also applied to healthcare institutions and consumers. Important issues such as consumer education, care and maintenance procedures, catheter-related complications and their management were rife with incomplete and inconsistent information. The unknowns, the discrepancies, and the misunderstandings about these critical lifelines likely led to serious problems. Devices were inserted by healthcare professionals and used, and maintained clinicians, and consumers with little or no up-to-date information. In June of 1985, Herbst sent a letter to 12 colleagues in the San Francisco Bay Area…colleagues whom she believed shared the same thoughts and concerns about VADs. She proposed the development of a multidisciplinary network to address the complexities of VADs and their insertion, use, care, and maintenance. Issues ranging from research and development of VADs, to educating the health care community, to informing the patient community were on her agenda. Her focus was on the best possible outcomes for infusion therapy and on excellence in the new specialty of vascular access.