Surgical infection prevention

Check out this article just published in the Archives of Surgery: "Enhancing Compliance With Medicare Guidelines for Surgical Infection Prevention: Experience With a Cross-disciplinary Quality Improvement Team." What were the measures?:

(1) percentage of patients receiving antibiotics within 1 hour of incision,
(2) percentage of patients with appropriately selected antibiotics, and
(3) percentage of patients with antibiotics discontinued within 24 hours of operation end time.

And the results:

One thousand seventy-two patients were monitored. Measure 1 compliance improved from 72.25% to 83.78% (P<.001, Cochran-Armitage trend test); improvement or high performance (>90% compliance) was demonstrated in 5 of 7 services. Measure 2 compliance remained uniformly high (approximately 98%). Measure 3 compliance improved from 54.5% to 87.16% (P<.001); improvement was seen in 5 of 7 services.

How did that do all that? They formed a multidisciplinary team comprised of "a surgeon, an anesthesiologist, nurses (preoperative, operating room, and floor), a pharmacist, a hospital infection control committee member" and quality improvement specialists. They defined the hospital guidelines for surgical infection prevention, they defined personnel roles, they standardized processes and enhanced communication/education for their health care professionals. Did their CME folks certify their improvement activity for credit? Don't know, but they could've! Click here to access the abstract.