Background: Surgical site infection (SSI) is an important postoperative complication. Even after improving the operating room practices, sterilization methods for instruments, better surgical technique and the best efforts of infection prevention practitioners, surgical site infections (SSIs) remain a major cause of nosocomial infections and their rates are increasing globally. E.coli, Staph. aureus, Pseudomonas are some of the common microbes causing SSI.

Objectives: To identify the common pathogens that causes SSI in emergency abdominal surgeries.

Materials and Methods: This prospective study involves following up the patients in general surgery department from December 2018 to December 2019 undergoing emergency abdominal surgeries. Patients are followed up for 30 days from the date of surgery. The wound is observed during dressing for any purulent discharge and aspectic swab culture done and processed by gram staining, cultured in agar to isolate the infective organism. Antimicrobial susceptibility also done by disc diffusion method.

Results: Over one half of the isolates were gram positive cocci and rest were gram negative bacilli. Staph. aureus was the commonest pathogen followed by E.coli and Enterococci. Staphylococcus isolated was found to be penicillin resistant, susceptibility to tetracyclin is 55.5%, that of clindamycin is 66.66%.

Conclusion: SSI is more common in contaminated abdominal surgeries than clean abdominal surgeries. The rate increases with increase in degree of contamination. To control the SSI, reducing the preoperative hospital stay, prophylactic antibiotic usage and reducing the duration of surgery are necessary.

Keywords: Surgical site infections, Nosocomial infection, contaminated abdominal surgeries.

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Dr D.Gopikrishna

Associate Professor, Dept of General Surgery, Rajah Muthiah Medical College and Hospital, Annamalai Nagar, Chidambaram, India, 608002