Safer Healthcare Now! - Sunnybrook - Surgical Site Infection

The goal of the Surgical Site Infection (SSI) intervention is to implement a series of protocols known as the SSI bundle to reduce the frequency of infections and deaths from SSI. Surgical complications, including surgical site infections, were the most frequent type of adverse event reported in the 2004 Canadian Adverse Event Study. Baseline data collected indicated that 32.7 per cent of teams reported administering prophylactic antibiotics within 60 minutes of the surgical incision in at least 75 per cent of their surgical patients, which increased to 75 per cent of teams following implementation of the Safer Healthcare Now! intervention. The rate of discontinuation of the prophylactic antibiotics within 24 hours post-operatively in at least 75 per cent of surgical patients increased from 36.9 per cent at baseline to 64.6 per cent following implementation of the intervention.