Abstract
Background: A sternal surgical site infection is a preventable post-operative complication that has implications including increased patient mortality, and increased hospital length of stay and healthcare costs. Improving nursing education can decrease infection rates.|Methods: This is a quality improvement study used to identify current nursing knowledge base of infection prevention practices. Nurses were surveyed pre- and post-educational intervention regarding infection prevention.|Results: Participation in the pre-education survey was 76% and 65% in the post-survey. Knowledge based question scores improved from 56% to 74%. Educational participation was 100%. Surgical site infections remained at 1.1% from 1.3%.|Conclusions: 97% of the post-survey respondents endorsed they ‘strongly disagreed’ when asked if nursing had very little impact on infection rates. Knowledge based scores improved from 56% to 74%. There was not enough evidence to suggest that this educational intervention for nurses is useful in preventing sternal surgical site infections.