Urgency of surgery as an indicator for the occurrence of surgical site infections: data from over 100,000 surgical procedures.

BACKGROUND

The risk for surgical site infections (SSIs) is influenced by patient- and procedure-related factors. Urgent surgery represents a challenge in operative medicine and is frequently linked to a variety of complications, including SSIs.

AIM: We aimed to investigate whether urgency was significantly associated with SSI occurrence, and determine whether collection of this variable provided useful information for SSI surveillance.

METHODS

We performed a retrospective data analysis of caesarean sections (C-sections) and colon surgeries conducted between 2017 and 2019 within the German national SSI surveillance network. A multivariable logistic regression model was utilized to determine the influence of urgency on SSI occurrence. For this purpose, data on procedures and SSIs were associated with available department- and patient-related parameters.

FINDINGS: A total of 115,648 procedures were included in the analysis: 78,288 C-sections and 37,360 colon surgeries. For C-sections, the SSI rate per 100 procedures was 0.98 (95% confidence interval: 0.85-1.11) for urgent and 0.46 (0.40-0.53) for elective procedures (P<0.001). For open colon surgeries, SSI rates were 9.66 (8.89-10.49) for urgent and 8.60 (8.13-9.11) for elective procedures (P<0.001). For laparoscopic colon surgeries, SSI rates did not differ significantly. Multivariable analysis revealed that urgency significantly increased the likelihood of SSI occurrence only for C-sections.

CONCLUSION

Urgency significantly increased the SSI risk of C-sections, but not colon surgeries. Hence, collection of this variable is useful for SSI surveillance of C-sections, but may be dispensable for other procedures. Future analyses on the matter should therefore focus on other procedure types.