Prevalence and distribution of surgical site infection in Cape Coast Teaching Hospital, Ghana

With the advent of medicine, surgical interventions have become the mainstay of survival and interventions for people's health conditions. As the occurrence of trauma, cancer, and other related organ-specific diseases continues to increase, the effect of surgical procedures on patients continues to increase. Most commonly, surgical therapies are the only therapies that can be lifesaving or reducing imminent threats to patients. Many patients undergo surgical treatment due to conditions such as trauma, pregnancy-related issues such as caesarean sections, and removal of malignant cancers. Although surgery is intended to be lifesaving, unsafe surgical procedures can result in serious injuries. One of the most common surgical effects is surgical site infection, the implications for which must be examined. The objective of this study was to ascertain the prevalence and distribution of surgical site infections in Cape Coast Teaching Hospital, as well as the distribution in terms of age, sex, type of surgery, clinical features of SSI cases, and common predisposing organisms.

The methodology encompasses; Study site/location at Cape Coast Teaching Hospital, cases of pre-operatively prepared patients as subjects for the study, a retrospective study design that will include all patients who had surgery during the periods of the study, data from the local health information and management systems and theatre surgery references were used as part of the tools used for collection of data.

The findings of this study revealed that the overall prevalence of surgical SSIs in the general surgical department of Cape Coast Teaching Hospital is 5.4%, with exploratory laparotomy having the highest SSI rate (41.7%). Patients with clean contaminated wounds developed SSIs after their surgery as compared to those with clean wounds. It was also revealed from the study that males had a higher prevalence of surgical site infection (55.4%) than females. Coagulase-negative S. aureus was the most common pathogen (2.3%).

The study provides insight into the prevalence and distribution of surgical site infections at Cape Coast Teaching Hospital, highlighting the most affected age groups, types of surgeries, and commonly isolated pathogens. These findings underscore the need for strengthened infection prevention strategies and improved surgical care practices to reduce the incidence of SSIs.