Newman Regional Health is faring equal to or better than the national average when it comes to surgical site infection control, board members were told Wednesday.
Jami White, a registered nurse at Newman, told the board of trustees that Newman usually does better than the national average. She said there are 27 million surgical procedures performed annually in the United States, of those approximately 5 percent develop a surgical site infection. Two-thirds of those involve only the incision and a third involve deep organs and spaces.
White said the impact of infections can be devastating to patients and their families, can cause physical and psychological discomfort, cosmetic alteration of appearance, loss of productivity and financial implications.
Patient risk factors include extremes of age, COPD, diabetes, renal insufficiency, nicotine use, presence of a remote infection, obesity or malnutrition, hospitalization for more than five days, mechanical ventilation for more than three days and steroids and other drugs that cause the immune system to be weakened.
Newman is striving to keep preoperative stays as short as possible and to identify and treat remote infection, including delaying elective procedures if infection is present at another site.
Newman also has implemented surgical surveillance, which determines risk and establishes baseline rates, provides education and feedback to surgical teams, evaluates effectiveness of processes related to the increased risk of surgical site infection and develops interventions to reduce rates.
Other items addressed during Wednesday’s meeting:
• Board members approved a capital request of $26,800 to upgrade outdated Windows server licenses from Version 2000 to Version 2003 to match current servers.
• Board members approved a capital request of $18,199 for additional licenses to allow all employees online access to policies and procedures. In addition, department directors and supervisors will have greater access to create new policies or update old ones, subject to approval process.
• Terry Lambert, chief executive officer, reported that the hospital hired an orthopedic surgeon. Lambert said he would like to employ two more full-time surgeons to give the hospital a staff with two general surgeons and one sports medicine specialist.
• Lambert reported that the hospital has candidates for internal medicine and a radiologist.