Protocol for surgical site infection surveillance with a focus on settings with limited resources

Overview

Health-care associated infections (HAI) surveillance and timely feedback of results, including SSI surveillance, are strongly recommended by WHO as part of the core components of effective infection prevention and control (IPC) programmes. Every health facility should be committed to this in order to provide quality, safe health care and to ensure that surveillance is not undertaken in isolation, but is instead connected to other evidence-informed activities. Conducting high-quality SSI surveillance is crucial to detect the magnitude of the problem and to assess the impact of any prevention/improvement intervention.This document provides a practical, reproducible and low-resource SSI surveillance methodology.