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safe patient care as the OR nurses.
No caving on no-flashing rule
The hospital's efforts reach far beyond the morning scrub. Patients
scheduled for total joint procedures attend an educational sit-down,
where they're schooled on all aspects of their perioperative care,
including proper infection control practices. Immediate-use steriliza-
tion is performed only in emergent cases. Otherwise, surgeons must
wait until instruments are run through full sterilization cycles. "We do
not cave," laughs Molly Wright, RN, the OR clinical care coordinator,
in such a way that you know she isn't joking.
The hospital staffs a pre-op nurse dedicated to ensuring the Surgical
Care Improvement Project's measures are followed, including the on-
time delivery of pre-op antibiotics. "Our peak performance on that front
is not because of only her efforts, but having a single person responsible
for it at all times — having that continuity — really helps," says Ms.
Benton.
Surgeons and staff work in concert to limit SSIs, sharing new prac-
tices they've read about in journals or heard at conferences. For
example, they now perform nasal swabs with povidone-iodine on
each patient within an hour of surgery as precautionary checks for
staph infections.
They also rely heavily on the expertise and diligence of the hospital's
anesthesia providers, who have a knack for probing pre-op interviews
that uncover red flags such as preexisting lung infections.
The department reports its monthly and quarterly infection rates to
the head of performance improvement, shares them at infection con-
trol meetings and posts them outside the ORs. If an infection does
occur, they drill deep into the potential causes to find out why. Did it
have to do with patient non-compliance at home or something that
