Preventing Infections During Surgery

Surgery Infections

When it comes to medical issues that can arise, one of the nastier things that can arise is an infection. Whether it be regular staph, MRSA or others, infections are things that can hurt, kill, maim or at least prolong suffering and recovery. One source of infections that becomes an issue entirely too often would be those that occur because of and during surgery. While it is normal for great pains to be taken to sanitize both the people and instruments involved in a surgery, it is entirely too common for people to come down with infections during the course of surgery. As such, it can and should be the focus of a fully described clinical practice guideline. While accidents and bad things do happen in surgery, infections should be one of those things that should never happen, at least not due to improper practice on the part of the medical professionals involved.

Analysis

The scope of the clinical practice guide in question here is fairly broad but still fairly focused. In short, any and all surgeries would be at issue where. This would include something as usually benign as a tonsillectomy or as rushed and hurried as emergency surgery to treat a shooting or stabbing victim. The purpose of the guideline is to reduce or hopefully eliminate the happenstance of a person getting operated on getting an infection during the course of treatment. The obvious objective is to figure out all of the causes of infections contracted during surgery and stop the same thing from happening with future surgeries and patients. The recipient of the services in question here is rather broad in that it is all people who are getting surgeries of any kind because the infection issue at hand could happen during and after any of them (Schulz et al., 2014).

The stakeholder involvement for this clinical practice guide is not hard to figure out and the stakeholders are easy to identify. There would be the medical professionals, the patient himself or herself, the family members of the patient and, to a lesser degree, the holders of the financial purse strings of the medical organization in question. While money should not be a factor when it comes to these matters, it most certainly is an issue and many healthcare organizations are private for-profit businesses or publicly traded for-profit businesses. There are also many non-profits and the like but money is an issue for them as well. It is an issue to the extent that conflicts of interest can arise due to decisions about money leading to infection issues, whether it be in surgery or elsewhere (Lopez et al., 2014).

The rigor of development for this clinical practice guide is very extensive, rigorous and credible. Trials, including randomized and controlled ones, have supported this. The use of quantitative studies is in heavy use but qualitative data exists as well, perhaps by necessity, but the overall criteria and methods would seem to be on point. The benefits and risks to the population are effectively fully known and they have been considered. However, infections persist. If one is to be honest, there can really only be three issues when it comes to preventing infections. One would be shortage of resources, another would be shortage of training and the third would be medical professionals acting in a hurried state. Indeed, preventing infection is fairly easy to figure out but not everyone is singing from the same proverbial hymnal due to lack of training or perhaps even an ambivalence to what is mandated. There is also the possibility that not everything that could and should be known about the subject is revealed. However, it would seem that adherence and allocation of resources if probably the biggest part of the problem, if not all of it (Rhee et al., 2015).