And move forward they
did, quickly cutting the
rate from a peak of 1.1%
in late 2014 to its current
level of about 0.3%.
Old and new
Ms. Conine and her staff
"started at the bottom
and reviewed everything
— basic OR 101," she
says. That meant intro-
ducing some new ideas,
as well as scrutinizing all
the old ones. The
strength of the compre-
hensive approach is that in any given facility, there may not be a sin-
gle identifiable cause of SSIs. Rather, any number of factors might be
contributing. Ms. Conine suggests numerous steps that any facility
can implement as part of a process improvement to help reduce infec-
tions:
1. Update your checklist for cleaning ORs between cases, and review
the terminal cleaning process done by environmental services (EVS).
Consider having the EVS supervisor round on a weekly basis to
ensure that procedures are being performed properly.
2. Scrutinize the decontamination and sterilization being done by cen-
tral processing. For example, make sure they aren't adding excessive
towels to instrument trays. You may be able to reduce lint by using
sterile packs of towels instead.
9 0
O U T P A T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5
z BIG IMPROVEMENT Mercy Tiffin OR staff members (from left)
Elaine Sendelbach, RN, Larry Gottfried, RNFA, Theresa
Swartzmiller, CSTFA, and Brooke Brickner, CST, helped
generate the strong downward trend in SSIs.
Susan
Predmore
O R E X C E L L E N C E AWA R D S O R E X C E L L E N C E AWA R D S
