The battle against contamination in the operating room

A fundamental element of safety and quality of care improvement policy in hospitals is the battle against nosocomial infections. Infections in the OR remain a frequent post-surgery complication factor: their rate, measured in studies, varies between 2 and 5%. The associated rate of lethality of these infections is around 2%, but some post surgery rates can go up to 30%. Some of these infections may have devastating functional consequences. They result in an average increase of the length of stay, from 7–10 days, to up to 20–30 days for important infections. This study proposes a method of evaluation and determination of the contamination risks in the OR, in order to lay down the necessary means to protect patients from post operatory infections. It is a matrix-based method that takes into account two groups of risk factors, each classified according to its risk level. The combination by multiplication of these two factors determines a resulting risk level that allows the adaptation of the necessary means to its prevention. This method is particularly adapted to the definition of the possible interventions amid OR sectors. It also allows to put together the operatory program in the same zone. The different OR components environment will eventually be defined according to each own zone risk factors. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]