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B E N C H M A R K I N G
manager at the Mount Nittany Medical Center in State College, Pa.
The challenge in benchmarking SSIs is finding out about them. You
most likely will have discharged the patient long before a SSI flares
up. Jill Andrews, RN, BSN, CNOR, administrator at the Central Utah
Surgical Center in Provo, Utah, sends a form to all surgeons with
information on all their procedures for the month. If there is a reported infection, she and her infection control specialist retrace the surgical paper trail. They first study the chart to see if there was anything
that would have triggered the infection. They look at the patient's history and comorbidities, the timeliness of antibiotic administration, the
sterilization logs and the operating room record. "We check to see if
there was something in the visit that would have precipitated the
infection," says Ms. Andrews, who checks with the surgeon's office to
see if any lab work was done or cultures taken, checking to see what
organism grew, if any. "We track this data on a spreadsheet and meet
quarterly with an infectious disease specialist to report our statistics,
along with the number of surgical procedures for that quarter," she
says, adding that the specialist tracks quarterly and yearly infection
rates.
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Patient satisfaction
Plastic surgeon Evan Sorokin, MD, FACS, of Delaware Valley
Plastic Surgery in Cherry Hill, N.J., calls patient satisfaction a
very important result. "This endpoint is a totality of the way patients
were treated by staff, anesthesia, nurses and the physician," says Dr.
Sorokin. "If patients aren't completely satisfied, then their concerns
must be carefully considered as potential improbable factors."
At the Chugay Cosmetic Surgery Medical Clinic in Long Beach,
Calif., they check patient satisfaction questionnaires "to monitor surgical results of each one of our surgeons." At the Torrance (Calif.)
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O U T PAT 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 | O C T O B E R 2013
