The impact of perioperative warm-up jackets on surgical site infection: cost without benefit?

Background On July 1st, 2012, the University of Minnesota Medical Centers adopted a policy requiring all personnel to wear cover jackets in perioperative areas. This policy is based on the Association of Perioperative Registered Nurses recommended practice for cover jacket usage. We hypothesized that the cover jacket policy had no effect on the surgical site infection rate. Methods We compared surgical site infection data from 1 year before the policy and 1 year after the policy. Twenty six thousand three hundred procedures were included: 13,302 before the policy and 12,998 after the policy. Rates between periods were compared using the z-test for proportions. Results The SSI rate precover and postcover jacket policy was 2.42% and 2.76% respectively. The P value was.1998. Our hypothesis was rejected because the change in rate was not statistically significant. Conclusions This study demonstrates that there was not a decrease in SSI rates with this cover jacket policy; in fact, the data show a trend toward an increase in SSI rate thus making the argument for the abandonment of the cover up jackets.