Limiting surgical site infection surveillance to the operative hospital can miss a substantial proportion of SSIs following hip or knee surgery, according to a study in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
Surgical site infection reports are based mainly on infections detected during surgical hospitalizations or readmissions to the same hospital, according to the study. Readmissions to other facilities, however, may affect hospitals' SSI rates.
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Researchers examined a database of California hospital data to estimate the number of SSIs within 365 days of total hip or knee arthroplasty that were detected at the operative hospital or another hospital.
SSIs occurred in 2.3 percent of hip surgery and 2 percent of knee surgery cases among patients who underwent the procedure from 2006 through 2009. Overall, 17 percent of SSIs were reported at a hospital other than the operative hospital. Between 0 and 100 percent of hospitals' SSIs were reported at a nonoperative hospital. The authors suggested more comprehensive post-discharge SSI surveillance is needed for accurate benchmarking.
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