• E-mail
• Print
• RSS

Because the OR is so fast-paced and unpredictable, how can you ensure your staff's and patients' safety?

Accreditation Connection, May 23, 2005

Patricia Gilroy, MSN, MBA, the clinical patient safety coordinator at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, DE, offers the following four safety tips for the OR:

1. Infection control: Always look at your overall infection rate, preop and postop, and try to see whether there's any correlation with postop infections. An infection control team should keep track of how soon clinicians administer postoperative prophylactic antibiotics, in keeping with the Surgical Infection Prevention Project. To gauge how well your infection control efforts are doing, regularly compare your hospital's infection rates with those of other hospitals.

2. Hand hygiene: A key factor in improving hand hygiene is staff awareness. Reminders for staff to wash their hands should hang throughout the OR department and over each sink. At duPont, an appointed staff member conducts periodic audits to ensure staff is following hand-hygiene protocol. "Our infection control person verifies that staff use gels appropriately and are washing their hands," says Gilroy. Staff perform 30-50 audits per year of the hospital's hand-hygiene practices and how they affect infection control.

3. Sharps safety: Hospitals have gained tremendous ground in curbing sharps injuries in the past five to 10 years, but there are still improvements to be made. For example, a hands-free technique should be second nature in most ORs. Make sure your technique is up to snuff and that nurses and physicians observe the "neutral zone," in which one person places the instrument in the zone, such as a tray, and the other picks it up.

4. Fire safety: The JCAHO points out that ORs have a higher incidence of fire, which led Gilroy to perform a full environment-of-care assessment of the duPont OR's fire-prevention system.

Because the hospital uses lasers for surgery, management felt it was important to appoint a laser-safety officer and develop policies for the use of lasers. Although staff had discussed it before, this was the first time they'd had a mandatory education module about fire and laser safety. "Everyone who works in the OR has to go through laser-safety training as part of their yearly education," says Gilroy.

• E-mail to a Colleague
• Print
• RSS
• Archive