Surgical Site Infections Quality Improvement Programme (Mölnlycke, June 2022)

Summary

This Quality Improvement Programme for Surgical Site Infections document was developed as an output of an advisory board meeting, convened by Mölnlycke. The meeting focused on developing a resource to aid healthcare professionals to deliver successful infection prevention programmes in their organisations. 

Content

The Quality Improvement Programme (QIP) for Surgical Site Infections (SSIs) has been developed to enable healthcare teams and hospitals to carry out their own quality improvement projects to prevent SSIs. The QIP was developed as an output of an advisory board convened by Mölnlycke, which focused on developing a resource to aid healthcare professionals to deliver successful infection prevention programmes in their organisations. This meeting was attended by representatives from the surgical community, infection prevention leads in the NHS, and patient safety advocates. The QIP showcases best practice in preventing SSIs across the patient pathway, and provides a step-bystep guide to how hospitals can implement a similar programme. It also provides links to useful tools for healthcare professionals, such as Excel document templates, to help measure improvement processes.

The QIP helps healthcare professionals to:

• Use tools to understand prevalence of SSIs.
• Consider what aspects of care, process, culture or behaviour may be contributing to the prevalence of SSIs.
• Identify which aspects to focus on first to realise the greatest chance of improvement.
• Identify the improvement tools that will best suit the individual project.