Ideas That Work: Gimmicks Get SSI Prevention Tips to Stick

Practical pearls from your colleagues

Getting your OR to remember all relevant surgical site infection (SSI) prevention protocols isn’t always easy — especially for the facilities with detailed, comprehensive SSI prevention programs in place. To make that critical information stick with busy staff who are being pulled in a hundred different directions, sometimes it helps to have a gimmick.*

For UW Health in Madison, Wis., that meant tapping into staff’s nostalgia and bringing back the buzzer-busting board game Operation. “Our take on a quick gimmick was using the Operation game to remind our staff about the key strategies in our SSI prevention bundles,” says Michelle Schmitz, BS, CIC, clinical infection control practitioner for UW Health Administrative Services. Specifically, the infection control team created an education tool (pictured) by using OPERATION as an acronym that stands for:

Out to check BG level on high-risk patients
Prepare the skin with CHG treatment & skin prep
Educate the patient on SSI prevention
Right drug, right dose, right time
Allow for standardized post-op dressing changes
Traffic in OR should be minimal
Instruments separate for closing
Operating room and patient should be kept warm, and
Need to double glove/change gloves before wound closure. OSM

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