Vol. 8, Issue 4, Part A (2024)

Surgical site infection (SSI) is one of the most frequent causes of postoperative morbidity. Surgical site infection is the most common nosocomial infection in our population accounting for 38% of all infections in surgical patients. The emergence of prophylactic antibiotics has made a huge contribution towards extending range and complexity of surgical procedures. Preoperative antibiotic prophylaxis is defined as administering antibiotics prior to performing surgery to help decrease the risk of postoperative infections. This is a prospective open label study was carried out at Department of Surgery, Rangamati Medical College, Rangamati, Bangladesh from January to December 2023. During this period, 80 cases were selected for our study purpose, all of which were clean or clean contaminated surgeries done under meticulous surgical technique. The group was split into group A and group B of 40 cases each. The study involved 80 clean and clean contaminated elective surgical cases were divided equally into two groups, Group A included 40 cases who received single prophylactic dose of 1 gm cefotriaxone given intravenously half an hour before surgery and Group B included 40 cases who did not receive any such antibiotic prior to surgery. The age incidence varied from 5 to 65 years but maximum number of patients belonged to 21 to 30 years age group. Group A had 30 clean surgical cases and 10 clean contaminated cases, out of which none of them were infected. In group B out of 30 clean cases, 1 case was infected and out of 10 clean contaminated cases 4 were infected. In the present study 6 patients in group B with obesity were found to have prolonged duration of surgery contributing to more than one risk factor for development of SSI. All the 6 patients who had prolonged duration of surgery and obesity developed surgical site infection. The 4 patients with diabetes mellitus (2 patients in each group) who had control of their diabetic status prior to surgery, none of them developed SSI. The average duration of the surgery in our study from the time of skin incision to the time of closure was 1 hour 30 minutes. There were no reports of any allergy and adverse effects to the prophylactic drug chosen. From this study we can conclude that, for clear cut cases of clean surgeries there is no need for prophylactic antibiotics, as there is no statistical significance, whereas in clean contaminated cases antibiotic prophylaxis is recommended as it is statistically significant.