From the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON.
Abstract
- Objective: To describe the iterative and adaptive process used in implementing strategies to reduce surgical site infections (SSI) in a pediatric academic health science center.
- Methods: A multidisciplinary group was tasked with implementing strategies to reduce SSI with a focus on evaluating the use of a guideline for the use of prophylactic antibiotics and determining the rate of SSI.
- Results: The task force initially addressed surgical preparation solution, hair removal, oxygenation, and normothermia. The task force subsequently revised a guideline for the use of prophylactic antibiotics and implemented the guideline iteratively with multiple strategies including audit and feedback, communication and dissemination, and computerised order entry. The appropriate use of the guideline was associated with a 30% reduction in the rate of SSI.
- Conclusion: Using iterative and adaptive strategies over many years, the SSI rate was reduced by 30%.
Improving quality of care is a prime concern for clinicians, patients, families, and health systems [1]. Quality improvement methods are used widely in medicine for studying and addressing problems with care and have successfully addressed gaps in quality. The challenges include defining quality, obtaining complete and accurate data about quality, developing meaningful and cost-effective interventions to improve quality, and to successfully change clinician’s behaviour with commensurate improvement in quality of care.
Quality improvement in health care involves effecting and assessing change in a setting of complexity and uncertainty. Whereas the randomized trial may be used to measure the effectiveness of a particular treatment, quality improvement implementation involves an iterative and adaptive process in response to local events as the implementation proceeds [2]. These context-specific iterative changes to the implementation process are the fuzzy elements of change. This article describes a quality improvement initative to to reduce surgical site infections at an academic health science center with a focus on the fuzziness inherent in the process and our iterative responses to local events.
Setting
The Hospital for Sick Children (Sickkids) is a childrens’ academic health science center in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The largest children’s hospital in Canada, with 8000 health care professionals, scientists, trainees, administrative and support staff, it has approximately 300 beds, 15,000 inpatient admissions, 12,000 surgical procedures, 70,000 emergency visits, and 300,000 outpatient visits annually. The hospital is a Level 1 trauma unit and performs the full spectrum of pediatric surgical care including transplant and cardiac procedures. The hospital and physician staffs are affiliated with the University of Toronto. The hospital has 16 theatre operating rooms, with 11 perioperative divisions and departments.
The departmental and divisional structure of the hospital, which emulates the university organizational structure, does not represent the size and level of clinical activity of the groups. For example, the department of otolaryngology, head and neck surgery has 5 surgeons whereas the division of orthopedics (as one of 6 divisions in the department of surgery) has 9 orthopedic surgeons. Furthermore, a divisional and departmental structure arguably does not match the institutional operational aims related to patient care delivery. Thus, in 2007 the 3 departments of surgery, the departments of critical care, anaesthesia and pain medicine, and dentistry were clustered together as “perioperative services,” reporting to a chief of perioperative services who in turn reported directly to the CEO. The chief of perioperative services, responsible for all operational issues, was concurrently the surgeon-in-chief.