How to Use the Resource Room

Congratulations on your commitment to improving the care of your patients!

This resource room is designed to facilitate the implementation of a multidisciplinary quality improvement team within 3 areas of complicated skin and skin structure infections: diabetic foot infections, surgical site infections, and stage III and stage IV pressure ulcers (PUs). Every institution is unique in its experience conducting quality improvement programs, its community needs, its available resources, and its existing procedures. Therefore, the processes have been designed with the expectation that they will be adapted to facilitate their integration into daily practices at your institution. We have attempted to include as many examples from different institutions as possible for example and reference.

Although we have attempted to present the information in a logical and sequential order, you and your improvement teams should not feel obligated to follow the exact order in which they are presented. In fact, you may find it difficult to follow a particular sequence and find that activities often occur in parallel in real life.

If you proceed through the resource room as presented, you will find that the Essential First Steps section reviews key principles applicable to any quality improvement initiative such as gaining support for an intervention, creating a team, and defining key outcomes. Next, Analyze Care Delivery explains how to perform an institutional assessment of your institution’s current care delivery in each of the 3 areas: DFIs, PUs, and SSIs. It then provides an evaluation plan and methods to maintain your improvements. After planning your intervention, you will learn how to manage the overall process. Be sure to use the cSSSIs Implementation Guide that serves as the portable version of the cSSSIs Resource Room, with the exception of: an extensive compilation of  clinical tools such as templates and order sets and an area to exchange information with your peers or ask an expert in cSSSIs a question, and a review of key literature.

This resource room leverages resources and assets at the SHM Web site, particularly the cSSSI Resource Room as well as the Glycemic Control Resource Room and the BOOSTing Care Transitions Resource Room