Essay On Surgical Site Infection

Surgical site infections are one the most common type of hospital-acquired infection, even in occurrence with pneumonia. This is an ongoing problem in today’s health care system. Nurses have many duties to the patient by implementing and following protocols to prevent infections and should also work with the whole health care team to avoid them.
Preventing surgical site infections is very important in the perioperative environment. This is so important, that the CDC and Hospital Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee released a guideline for health care workers to follow when caring for clients at risk. This guideline is appointed for all health care workers directly involved with surgical patients to provide the best care possible when assessing, developing, and evaluating care.
In addition to the fact that perioperative nurses are required to follow guidelines and protocols to prevent patients from acquiring surgical site infections, they also should work with other health care team members to avoid these. There are trained registered nurses who work as Infection Preventionists (IP) that have a main focus of preventing patients from acquiring an infection. IPs need to work very closely with …show more content…
Many interventions that could be used by nurses today to prevent surgical site infections include: hand hygiene, taking vital signs, making sure that they use personal protective equipment in the OR, administering prophylactic antibiotics if ordered, allowing the patient to wash with a skin prep if ordered, cutting hair off of the surgical site instead of shaving, maintaining sterile technique in the OR and making sure others do the same, and continuously monitor the incision site for infection after the surgery is finished. If these interventions are not done, this exposes the patient to numerous types of bacteria that could be potentially infectious to the