A study of aerobic bacteriological profile of surgical site infections in a tertiary care hospital

Surgical Site Infection (SSI) is the leading cause of all Healthcare Associated Infections in developing countries. SSIs are a frequent cause of morbidity and mortality among inpatients of hospitals. For proper management of the patients it is very essential to know which pathogen has caused the infection and also its antibiotic susceptibility.1. To determine the aerobic bacteriological profile, 2. To know the antibiotic susceptibility patterns of the bacterial isolates. This retrospective study was carried out on 320 culture positive swabs, tissue & discharge samples received over a one year period from January 2019 to December 2019 in the department of Microbiology from Surgery, Orthopaedics & Obstetrics and Gynaecology (OBG) departments. Data analysis was done on the microbiological profile of the aerobic isolates and its antibiotic susceptibility pattern. Among the 320 samples monomicrobial growth was seen in 316 (98.75%) samples whereas polymicrobial growth was seen in 04 samples (1.25%). Out of the 324 isolates Gram negative bacilli constituted 239(73.76%) and Gram positive cocci constituted 26.24%. The predominant isolate in the study was 101(31.17%) followed by 68(20.98%).The other major isolates were Citrobacter spp. 48(14.81%), . 41(12.65%), 24(7.41%), 17(5.25%) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa 14(4.31%). This study shows that and are the commonest organisms associated with the surgical site infection. Simple measures like appropriate hand hygiene can go a long way in bringing down the rate of SSI as well as slowing down the further spread of the resistant hospital strains.