Reported Postoperative Surgical Site Infections in Tertiary Care Hospitals, Systematic Review of Recent Literature

The objective of this systematic review is to evaluate the patterns of postsurgical site infections, pre-surgical antibiotics prophylaxis, and related clinical outcomes in the recently published literature.

This systematic review is registered with PROSPERO registration number CRD42023398963. Several databases and individual journal websites were used to collect data from PubMed/Medline, TRIP, SCOPUS, Elsevier, Springer, ProQuest, and EMBASE. The established criteria of inclusion were RCTs, retrospective, prospective, and cross-sectional studies with patients who had a recent surgical procedure. Excluded from the study designs were systematic reviews, prospective studies, data on pediatrics, and data on disabilities. Quality assessment analysis of the results for randomized controlled trials (RCT) used CONSORT guidelines and STROBE guidelines for cross-sectional and cohort studies.

A total of 328 articles were identified from different databases. Among them, 15 studies were included for data extraction and qualitative analysis. A total of 33,193 patients with an average rate of 11.5% (surgical site infections- SSIs) were identified in these studies during 2008-2022. The mean rate of SSIs among the total number of immunocompromised patients/ procedures was 10.2%. The SSI on patients undergoing major surgical procedures with visible incisions was 26.0%. The majority of the studies reported the use of pre-surgical antibiotic prophylaxis. Cefazolin was mostly prescribed antibiotics and administered in 90% of patients. Other antibiotics included ceftriaxone (4%), cloxacillin (3%), and vancomycin (4%). The mean reported rate of SSIs with combination antibiotic prophylaxis therapy was 22.8%.

This systematic review concluded the limited reported data on surgical site infections (SSIs). The overuse of pre-surgical antibiotic prophylaxis has been reported in several studies. This study recommended developing standardized guidelines on the use of antibiotics related to surgical cases rather than co-morbidities.