Surgical Wound Infection

In an 8-year study, researchers found that 14.4% of bloodstream infections identified in patients within 2 weeks of hospital discharge had been acquired during hospitalization and would have been misclassified as health care-associated community onset bloodstream infections — rather than hospital-onset infections — without the inclusion of their history.

Surveillance systems for surgical site infections, or SSIs, may exclude more than 50% of outpatient surgeries predicted to have an increased likelihood of an adverse event, based on data from more than two dozen Veterans Affairs facilities.

The current CDC National Healthcare Safety Network method of calculating rates of surgical site infection, or SSI, underestimates the SSI rate in procedures like laminectomies and rectal surgeries that are performed with higher-ranking procedures, researchers found.

LAS VEGAS — At the American Society for Surgery of the Hand Annual Meeting, Kevin F. Lutsky, MD, discussed a study that looked at the rate of surgical site infections with the use of intraoperative corticosteroid injections in concomitant hand procedures. Lutsky said patients who underwent concomitant cortisone injections on the ipsilateral side of the surgical site had an increased risk of surgical site infections.