Wound infection in day-surgery

Abstract

To determine the surgical wound infection rate associated with day-surgery and to assess whether infection was related to patient factors, a prospective study of all electively operated adult day-cases was carried out during a 6 month period between January and June 1996. The study included gastroenterological orthopaedic, vascular, plastic and urological surgery. No operations involving obviously infected patients were performed in the unit. Strict criteria for diagnosis of infection were used. All patients were examined on the 7th and 30th post-operative day. A total of 642 (98.8%) patients were included (316 females 334 males). Infection developed in 22 of the 642 patients (3.5%), only three were diagnosed before the 7th day visit. Orthopaedic procedures accounted for more than 40% of the surgery, but only 22.7% of the wound infections. Gastroenterology made up nearly 36% of the procedures and accounted for 36.4% of the infections. Vascular procedures were 5.7% of the total but accounted for 18% of the infections. No correlation was found between age, gender, operation time or ASA-group and the infection rate. The study is to small to quantify with statistical significance risk-factors associated with wound infection in ambulatory surgery. Our data may suggest that the type of surgery as well as individual factors associated with surgeons may influence the wound infection rate.