Effectiveness of nursing intervention in the operating room to prevent wound infections in patients undergoing orthopaedic surgery: A meta-analysis

Abstract

Surgical site wound infection is one of the most common postoperative complications in orthopaedic clinical practice. This study employed a meta-analysis approach to comprehensively evaluate the effect of operating room nursing interventions on the prevention of surgical site wound infections in orthopaedic surgical patients. A computer search was conducted using PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM), VIP, and Wanfang databases from the inception of each database until May 2023 for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that investigated the application of operating room nursing interventions in orthopaedic surgery. Two reviewers independently screened the literature, extracted data, and assessed study quality. The meta-analysis was conducted using Stata 17.0. A total of 29 studies involving 3567 patients were included, with 1784 patients in the intervention group, and 1783 patients in the control group. The results of the meta-analysis showed that compared with the control group, the use of operating room nursing interventions significantly reduced the incidence of surgical site wound infection after orthopaedic surgery (2.85% vs. 13.24%; odds ratio: 0.18, 95% confidence interval: 0.14–0.25; p < 0.001). Current evidence suggests that operating room nursing interventions reduce the incidence of surgical site wound infections. However, owing to the limited number and low quality of the studies, more high-quality, large-sample RCTs are needed to further verify these findings.