Effects of clinical nursing pathway on surgical site wound infection in patients undergoing acute appendicitis surgery: A meta-analysis

y This study aimed to explore the impact of clinical nursing pathway applied to acute appendicitis surgery on patients' postoperative wound infections and complications. A computerised search of PubMed, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, EMBASE, Wanfang, Chinese Biomedical Literature Database and China National Knowledge Infrastructure was conducted and supplemented by a manual search, from database inception to October 2023, to collect randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on the application of clinical nursing pathways to acute appendicitis surgery. Literature screening, data extraction and quality assessment of the included literature were carried out independently by two researchers. RevMan 5.4 software was applied for data analysis. Twenty-one RCTs with a total of 2408 patients were finally included. The analysis revealed the implementation of clinical nursing pathway could effectively reduce the incidence of wound infection (OR = 0.26, 95% CI: 0.15-0.46, p < 0.001) and postoperative complications (OR = 0.20, 95% CI: 0.15-0.27, p < 0.001), as well as shorten the hospital length of stay (MD = -3.26, 95% CI: -3.74 to -2.79, p < 0.001) and accelerated the time to first ventilations (MD = -14.85, 95% CI: -21.56 to -8.13, p < 0.001), as well as significantly improved patient satisfaction (OR = 5.52, 95% CI: 3.52-8.65, p < 0.001) in patients undergoing surgery for acute appendicitis. The application of clinical nursing pathway in acute appendicitis surgery can significantly reduce postoperative wound infection and complications, and at the same time can shorten the hospital length of stay as well as improve the satisfaction of patients.