A surgery is sometimes needed to help treat certain conditions. While surgery helps many children feel better, it does carry some risk, like infections at the site where the surgery occurred on the body. This type of infection in the area of the body where the surgical incision was made is referred to as a surgical site infection (SSI).
These types of infections can result in extra days in the hospital, can delay recovery from the surgery and sometimes can make the child feel very ill, requiring extra medications to help them recover quickly and treat the infection.
We follow a national definition for how to define when a surgical site infection occurs after certain surgeries (e.g. spinal fusions, ventricular shunt surgeries, and heart surgery). These infections are tracked and reported to a national registry. We follow these metrics every month and create graphs and charts to measure how we are improving over time so we can compare ourselves to other hospitals.
We are part of a national collaborative called the Children’s Hospital Solutions for Patient Safety (CHSPS) in which hospitals share ideas and data and work together to decrease these infections nationwide. We have established standardized processes for what type of antibiotics to use, how to clean the patient’s skin well before, during, and after surgery, along with other strategies. We use checklists to ensure that the processes are followed. We regularly train our staff and measure how well we perform these processes. We investigate each infection in an attempt to find opportunities for improvement.
