Another issue is: it’s one thing to do a series of studies showing that an action decreases SSIs, and that the cost:benefit is worth it. It’s another thing to make a policy because I seems to make sense, and then mandate it.
Infections depend not only upon everything mentioned here, but factors such as the patient’s lifestyle and the type of surgery.
As an ENT guy, I can’t tell you how much I love it any time there’s some new policy that gets implemented because there’s been an increase in SSI in Ortho, and I have to follow it because it’s a blanket policy, but here I am where SSIs in non-oncologic ENT surgery are as close to non-existent as they will ever be (or, alternatively, approaching 100% like in the case of sinus survery where it was infected to begin with.) Nurses who refuse to start a septoplasty case until they’ve prepped the patients face….amazingly, his nose is full of bacteria and that’s where the surgery is actually taking place…
Or when the hospital system has its annual rotation of demanding that we autoclave our NP scopes instead of dipping them despite there being research showing it doesn’t matter, but GI does it that way so we should too. At greater expense, with increasing equipment failure rates and longer turnover times…
…ok, I’m done…