Patient Care and Safety

A couple years ago, we looked at what we could do interoperatively to improve patient care. One of those things was reducing infection. Preoperatively, we've added antibiotics to our bowel preps and use IV antibiotics and washes. Intraoperatively, one of the things that we found in the literature is that by having a clean closure tray it can be effective to prevent infection and/or reduce the risk of infection. At the end of the procedure after we've done all the resections, the team changes gloves and gowns; we redrape, and then we use clean instruments to close up the abdomen. We've added that to our enhanced recovery protocol. We didn't have a very high infection rate to begin with, but that has dropped since we started as well.