DOI: 10.36347/sasjs

Pages: 214-224

Infection is the most common complication of wound healing and is a constant threat to all types of surgery. The basic consideration in choosing antimicrobials is its efficacy, toxicity and cost effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to identify the need of using antibiotic prophylaxis in clean and clean-contaminated surgical wounds and to study comparatively with various risk factors. This study involved 94 clean or clean-contaminated surgeries done in our hospital, split into group A and group B (47 cases each) with only Group A being given broad spectrum preoperative antibiotic prophylaxis. The overall infection rate was 8.51% (2 % in clean cases and 15.91% in clean-contaminated cases). The contribution of obesity (P value = 0.000005) and prolonged operative time (P value = 0.0243) for the development of SSI was significant whereas contribution of age was not significant. Escherichia coli was found to be the most common organism rather than Staphylococcus aureus. It also showed that clean-contaminated surgical wounds were more prone to develop surgical site infection and prophylactic antibiotic was not found to be useful in clean cases but shown to have a definite role in avoiding surgical site infection in clean-contaminated surgical cases particularly in patients associated with unavoidable risk factors