Lab 5 Introduction

Surgery breaches the patient’s normal protective mechanisms against microorganisms in the environment. This can lead to infection after surgery.

Infection is minimized by strictly following the principles of aseptic surgery during:

1. preparation of the patient
2. preparation of the surgeon
3. achieving the sterile field
4. maintaining sterility

If you don’t understand the rationale behind a specific practice, be sure to ask. Understanding the rationale behind these protocols is important to incorporating these steps into your routine surgical practices and being able to come up with solutions to new situations that will inevitably develop.

Objectives

When the lab is completed, you should be able to:

1. Explain the difference between sterile, surgically clean and contaminated.
2. Prepare a patient’s surgical site
3. Perform a surgical hand scrub
4. Aseptically don a surgical gown
5. Aseptically don gloves using the closed gloving technique
6. Aseptically drape the surgical site
7. Maintain the sterile field throughout a surgical procedure
8. Explain the rationale behind these procedures

• Introduction
• Lab 5 . Part 1 - Surgical site preparation
• Lab 5 . Part 2 - Surgical team preparation
• Lab 5 . Part 3 - Achieving a sterile field
• Lab 5 . Part 4 - Maintaining sterility
• Lab 5 . Part 5 - Self Test