The Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority and Pennsylvania hospitals participating in the American College of Surgeons (ACS) National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) entered into a joint quality improvement collaboration to reduce surgical site infections (SSIs) among Pennsylvania NSQIP member hospitals and to share successful strategies and lessons learned with other Pennsylvania hospitals. Using an SSI prevention assessment tool based on the ACS best practices relevant to bariatric and colectomy surgery, analysts identified variances between implementation of best practices in hospitals with high SSI rates (outliers) and hospitals with low SSI rates. The outlier hospitals monitored and documented their process steps, barriers, successes, and outcome measures for implementation of SSI prevention practices in bariatric and colectomy procedures selected from the variance assessment. Both the colectomy and the bariatric outlier sites demonstrated substantial improvement in their SSI rates from the 2010 baseline period to March 2013. This improvement was accompanied by enhanced implementation of best-practice systems and processes.
Copyright:
Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further use of the material is subject to CC BY-NC-ND license. (More information)