Grant: CIHR Clinician Scientist - Phase 1

Hospital associated infections are a common and preventable cause of death in Canada. In particular, surgical site infections lead to longer hospital stays, more patient suffering, increased mortality, and greater economic costs for hospitals and health care systems. These adverse events arise from a complex interaction of pathogen, patient and procedural factors. Strategies to prevent surgical site infections, therefore, must be broad based targeting preoperative, intraoperative and postoperative risk factors. Effective surgical site infection surveillance systems are vital to detect these novel risk factors for infection, provide benchmark infection rates, and identify substandard processes. The gold standard has been clinical surveillance networks, but the intensive labour and financial costs of these systems limit the extent of participating hospitals, the capacity for outpatient follow up, and the ability to account for different levels of risk. Datasets extracted from administrative logs offer another potential source of surveillance, with advantages of population-based data, cost-efficiency, outpatient follow-up, and robust risk adjustment. This research program will aim to harness administrative and clinical datasets for the surveillance, evaluation, prevention and science of infections after surgery. The goal will be the identification of modifiable patient, surgeon and hospital risk factors for surgical site infection, as well as the establishment of an ongoing network to improve the care of Canadian surgical patients.