Hospital for Special Surgery shares best practices to benefit of Britis...( Using their best practice methods fo...),Health

Using their best practice methods for infection control and patient care, Hospital for Special Surgery in New York has helped a new British hospital lower their infection rates and average length of stay.

Infection control and length of stay are concerns for any hospital, so when the United Kingdom decided to create a new state-of-the-art orthopedic hospital concentrating on joint replacement surgery they reached out to the largest orthopedic hospital in the world, Hospital for Special Surgery. With the goal of reducing the rate of infection and length of stay after surgery in the new facility, they entered into a collaboration with staff at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), involving them at every stage of planning and execution.

As reported in the first issue of The Journal of Arthroplasty this year, data collected during the first 10 months in operation of the South West London Elective Orthopaedic Centre in 2004 showed that the hospital had decreased their infection rates from one percent to 0.16 percent and length of stay by an average of five days, from 11 to 6 days. This decrease was benchmarked against a 2000 national survey by the Royal College of Surgeons of England and the British Orthopaedic Association that showed for total hip replacement surgery, the average patient stay was between eight to 12 days and that the deep wound infection rate was one percent.

The waiting time for patients undergoing hip replacement surgery in the United Kingdom was almost a year. The government issued a report in 2003 stating that the time should be decreased to reduce unnecessary pain and suffering, said Thomas P. Sculco, M.D., surgeon-in-chief of HSS. The construction of a new hospital for orthopedic procedures was one of the outcomes of the report, and they contacted HSS to incorporate our best practices in their new hospital.

Representatives from Hospital for Special Surgery went to London right at the beginning, as
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