Impact of postdischarge surveillance on surgical site infection rates for several surgical procedures: results from the nosocomial surveillance network in The Netherlands.

Objective: To compare the number of surgical site infections (SSIs) registered after hospital discharge with respect to various surgical procedures and to identify the procedures for which postdischarge surveillance (PDS) is most important.

Design: Prospective SSI surveillance with voluntary PDS. Recommended methods for PDS in the Dutch national nosocomial surveillance network are addition of a special registration card to the outpatient medical record, on which the surgeon notes clinical symptoms and whether a patient developed an SSI according to the definitions; an alternative method is examination of the outpatient medical record.