Key result
A hospital-wide initiative decreased immediate use steam sterilization for implants from 10.22% to 0.09% and reduced surgical site infection rates from 5.4% to 1.4%.
Why the study?
Does a hospital-wide initiative reduce the use of immediate use steam sterilization and surgical site infection rates?
Does a hospital-wide initiative reduce the use of immediate use steam sterilization and surgical site infection rates?
A comprehensive hospital-wide initiative significantly reduced the use of immediate use steam sterilization and was associated with a decrease in surgical site infection rates.
May support minimizing immediate-use steam sterilization to cut infections; hypothesis-generating pending controlled trials.
Instruments and implants sterilized by immediate use steam sterilization (IUSS), formerly called flash sterilization, can increase the patient's risk for acquiring a surgical site infection. We implemented a hospital-wide initiative to determine the reasons that perioperative personnel use IUSS to sterilize items and then designed a program to reduce the hospital's rates. Program initiatives included educating perioperative personnel, improving scheduling processes, holding vendor discussions, purchasing additional instrument sets, and transitioning from paper wrap to metal containers for instrument sets. In addition, we instituted a policy whereby nursing leaders are required to approve IUSS before it can be used and developed guidelines for immediate and rapid processing in the sterile processing department, and we monitor compliance daily and communicate results regularly to all team members. These efforts decreased our facility use of IUSS for implants from 10.22% in January 2008 to 0.09% in August 2012, and we decreased our use of IUSS for instruments from 79% in May 2010 to 7.5% in February 2012. We simultaneously implemented a process to reduce surgical site infection rates and saw an improvement in surgical site infection from 5.4% in the first quarter of 2010 to 1.4% in the fourth quarter of 2012.
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Hutzler et al. (2013) studied Surgical site infection and immediate use steam sterilization. Hospital-wide quality improvement initiative vs. Historical baseline was evaluated on Surgical site infection rate. A hospital-wide initiative decreased immediate use steam sterilization for implants from 10.22% to 0.09% and reduced surgical site infection rates from 5.4% to 1.4%.
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