The clinical effectiveness of an integrated multidisciplinary evidence-based program to prevent intraoperative pressure injuries in high-risk children undergoing long-duration surgical procedures: A quality improvement study.

The prevention of hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPIs) in children undergoing long-duration surgical procedures is of critical importance due to the potential for catastrophic sequelae of these generally preventable injuries for the child and their family. Long-duration surgical procedures in children have the potential to result in high rates of HAPI due to physiological factors and the difficulty or impossibility of repositioning these patients intraoperatively. We developed and implemented a multi-modal, multi-disciplinary translational HAPI prevention quality improvement program at a large European Paediatric University Teaching Hospital. The intervention comprised the establishment of wound prevention teams, modified HAPI risk assessment tools, specific education, and the use of prophylactic dressings and fluidized positioners during long-duration surgical procedures. As part of the evaluation of the effectiveness of the program in reducing intraoperative HAPI, we conducted a prospective cohort study of 200 children undergoing long-duration surgical procedures and compared their outcomes with a matched historical cohort of 200 children who had undergone similar surgery the previous year. The findings demonstrated a reduction in HAPI in the intervention cohort of 80% (p < 0.01) compared to the comparator group when controlling for age, pathology, comorbidity, and surgical duration. We believe that the findings demonstrate that it is possible to significantly decrease HAPI incidence in these highly vulnerable children by using an evidence-based, multi-modal, multidisciplinary HAPI prevention strategy.

A systematic review of hospital foodservice patient satisfaction studies.

The quality of hospital foodservice is one of the most relevant items of health care quality perceived by patients and by their families. Patient satisfaction is considered a way of measuring the quality of services provided. The purpose of this study was to retrieve and review the literature describing patient satisfaction with hospital foodservices. The systematic review was conducted on three electronic archives, PubMed, Excerpta Medica Database, and the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (1988 through 2012), to search for any articles reporting patient satisfaction with hospital foodservices. A total of 319 studies were identified. After removing duplicates, 149 abstracts were reviewed, particular attention being given to the presence of a description of the tool used. Thirty-one articles were selected and the full texts were reviewed. Half the studies (n=15) were performed in North America. Patient satisfaction scores were generally high, with some variation among hospitals and different modes of food delivery that was investigated through intervention studies. Qualitative studies were also reported (ethnographic-anthropologic methods with interviews and focus groups). Quantitative tools were represented by questionnaires, some of which relied on previous literature and only a few were validated with factorial analysis and/or Cronbach's α for internal consistency. Most analyses were conducted assuming a parametric distribution of results, an issue not primarily tested. More studies on the quality of hospital foodservice have been carried out in North America than in Europe. Also, a variety of tools, most of which have not been validated, have been used by the different investigating facilities.