Protocol = procedure?

Context:

I trained at major American teaching hospitals such as Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital, University of Vermont Medical Center and Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, each of which offered what we believed to be the best burn treatments in the world. We were confident in the 1980’s that no one took better care of burn patients than we did. Our burn patients were treated in technologically endowed surgical suites, given potent double anti-biotic intravenous protocols along with topical silver-impregnated cold cream, all this administered under utterly sterile conditions in isolation suites and, of course, costing enormous sums of money. Our goals were, in retrospect, quite humble: keep the patients alive, reduce their pain, control their infection, and perform any surgery necessary to maximize their cosmetic and functional recovery. Typically, the majority of our patients left our burn units horribly scarred yet appreciative of our efforts.