Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Helping Hand - July 2019 - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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epidemiologist and director of infection prevention and control at UT Southwestern. "In fact, they were performing those basic prepping steps correctly in less than 50% of observed cases." Dr. Arocha says these results are on par with national averages, sug- gesting improper prepping is a problem in ORs across the country, possibly even yours. The essential first step to improving prepping practices is to get out from behind your desk, slip on some scrubs and observe your surgical team in action. 1. Audit application Audit your staff's compliance with a prep's specific application method, application time and dry time, says Barbara Hasnain, BSN, RN, CIC, an infection preventionist who was involved in most of the staff observations conducted at UTSW. She says the application mis- takes she saw were consistently inconsistent, and varied based on prepping product and across service lines. There were, for example, significant variances in how staff per- formed the 2-step scrub and paint application process of povidone- iodine preps. Ms. Hasnain also noticed that staff achieved the required 30-second application time for CHG-alcohol preps during only 6% of cases, missing the mark by an average of 15 seconds. "Nurses were applying the solutions based on surgeon preference or how they were originally trained, however long ago that might have been," she says. "Even if staff had originally been instructed on proper application techniques, drift happened over time and they became lax in their practice." Ms. Hasnain saw the issues firsthand, and huddled with her col- leagues to formulate a plan on how to address them. 2. Limit the options 6 8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J U L Y 2 0 1 9

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