Infections Webinar

Learn about Preventing Surgical Site Infections from Dr. Dellinger. A surgeon’s perspective – Hysterectomies, Joint Replacement, & Colectomies.

Dr. Dellinger is Professor of Surgery, Emeritus and headed the Acute Care Surgery team at the University of Washington Medical Center until he stopped clinical practice in July 2018.  Until then he was also an Associate Medical Director of the University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC) where he was recently Chief of Staff.

He graduated from Swarthmore College and from Harvard Medical School.  During surgical residency at the Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, MA, he completed an Infectious Disease Fellowship at Tufts with Drs. Louis Weinstein and Michael Barza.  He is past president of the Surgical Infection Society (SIS), a fellow of the American College of Surgeons (ACS), of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA).  He is a member of the American Surgical Association, the Society of University Surgeons, the American College of Surgeons, and the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery.

He was on the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee of the CDC (HICPAC) from 2004-07.  He served on the Working Group on preventing surgical site infection as part of the second Global Patient Safety Challenge “Safe Surgery Saves Lives” of WHO which resulted in the Surgical Safety Checklist in 2009.  He performed general and bariatric surgery at the University of Washington from 1977 to 2018 where he was Chief of the Division of General Surgery for 23 years.  He co-chaired the Surgical Infection Prevention Subcommittee of the Hospital Infection Prevention Committee at UWMC.  He was on the management committee of the Surgical Care and Outcomes Assessment Program (SCOAP) and chaired the
Surgical Checklist Initiative for Washington State sponsored by SCOAP in 2008-9.
He has authored and/or coauthored more than 220 papers and chapters (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/collections/bibliography/40080532/).

Dr. Dellinger’s work in the area of evidence-based practice and infection prevention includes his time on HICPAC, his co-authorship of IDSA guidelines for surgical antibiotic prophylaxis and for management of soft-tissue infections, his authorship of joint guidelines for prevention of Central Line Associated Blood Stream Infections (CLABSI) jointly sponsored by HICPAC, Society for Critical Care Medicine, SIS, and IDSA, his co-authorship of the Guideline for treatment of intra-abdominal infections, a joint guideline from SIS and IDSA, and his co-authorship of the Clinical Practice Guidelines for Antimicrobial Prophylaxis in Surgery, a joint guideline sponsored by the American Society of Health System Pharmacists, IDSA, SHEA, and SIS in 2013.  He is a member of the writing group for the new HICPAC guidelines for prevention of surgical site infections which was published in JAMA Surgery in 2017.  He is an original member of the Technical Expert Panel that advised CMS for the SCIP infection prevention.  He is a member of the Expert Steering Committee with the World Health Organization (WHO) for the Development of Guidelines and Implementation Strategy on the Prevention of Surgical-Associated Infections which was published in 2016 and continues to work with WHO on updates to the guideline.  The most recent meeting of this group at WHO was in December 2018.  He is currently a member of the IDSA writing group that is updating the IDSA guidelines for treatment of intra-abdominal infections, and he is a member of the SHEA writing group that is working on a new guideline for infection prevention in the anesthesia work station in the O.R.  and on the writing group that is working on a SHEA white paper, which will discuss changes since the 2010 publication of the “SHEA Guideline for Management of Healthcare Workers Who Are Infected with Hepatitis B Virus, Hepatitis C Virus, and/or Human Immunodeficiency Virus.”