Public Health England (PHE) has published a new report on the prevalence and variation in surgical site infections (SSIs) across NHS hospitals and independent sector treatment centres across the UK.
In 2018/2019, 201 NHS hospitals and eight independent sector NHS treatment centres submitted surveillance data for 132,254 surgical procedures to the PHE SSI Surveillance Service. Across 17 surgical categories, 1183 SSIs were detected during inpatient stay or on readmission.
Ten-year trends in annual inpatient/readmission SSI risk varied by surgical category, with the SSI risk following hip replacement surgery decreasing to 0.4 per cent in 2018/2019 and knee replacement surgery remaining stable at 0.4 per cent.
Spinal surgery has seen the greatest per cent increase overall in the annual inpatient/readmission SSI risk, from 0.9 per cent in 2009/2010 to 1.5 per cent in 2018/2019, while coronary artery bypass surgery has had the greatest per cent decrease overall from 5.7 per cent in 2009/2010 to 2.3 per cent in 2018/2019. Annual inpatient/readmission SSI risk following large bowel surgery increased to 9.0 per cent in 2018/2019.
National benchmarks for inpatient and readmission-detected SSI have remained relatively stable and ranged from 8.7 per cent for large bowel surgery to <1.0% for hip and knee replacement surgery. Repair of neck of femur surgery had the highest proportion of SSI classified as deep incisional or organ/space (72.0%), followed closely by hip replacement surgery at 71.0 per cent.
Enterobacterales continued to make up the largest proportion of causative organisms across all surgical categories in 2018/2019 (30.0%) but did not increase from 2017/2018.
