Surgical site infection
Unfortunately 2-5% of patients who have surgery will subsequently develop a wound infection, also known as a surgical site infection (SSI).
The consequences of a SSI can be significant. For this reason, a comprehensive infection prevention programme is in place in every Southern Cross hospital.
Our SSI surveillance programme was first established in 2002, making it one of the longest running in New Zealand. It utilises a standardised system of monitoring and checking for SSIs both during your stay and after your discharge.
Surveillance focuses mainly on procedures considered higher risk for post-operative infection, and which can be particularly devastating should an infection develop. This includes hip and knee joint replacement procedures.
Your nurses will let you know if your procedure falls under your hospital’s current SSI surveillance programme. If so, they will give you more information about what that means. Surveillance begins when you are admitted and continues while you are in hospital and after you go home.
Before you come to hospital
If your completed patient admission forms reveal factors that could increase your risk of developing a SSI, we can address these before you come to the hospital.
While you are in hospital
Once in hospital, the risk of developing a SSI cannot be completely eliminated. However, by following stringent practices in our operating theatres and in our pre- and post-operative settings, we aim to reduce it as much as possible.
We closely monitor you for infections during your stay. We review any that do occur and provide feedback to our medical practitioners and nursing teams. This allows them to make changes to practice if needed.
After you go home
As most infections occur after the patient leaves hospital, SSI surveillance post-discharge involves staying in touch with you to monitor your wound as it heals. Any wound infection that occurs is fully investigated in order to ensure we have followed accepted good practice and to identify any potential for quality improvements.
Monitoring the performance of our SSI surveillance programme
We audit surgical site infection rates in our hospitals twice a year. When we share the results, we include DHB rates collected by the Health Quality and Safety Commission (HQSC) in order to provide a basis for comparison.
However, it is important to understand there are some differences in the way this information is collected:
At Southern Cross Healthcare, we follow up with all patients who have undergone certain procedures and include them in our results, even if they had a superficial infection which did not need readmission for treatment; the HQSC data only includes those who developed infection while in hospitals or those who could not be treated by a GP but needed to be readmitted to hospital.
Despite these differences, this is an area in which Southern Cross Healthcare performs well.
We also perform SSI surveillance on a wide range of other procedures. This helps us monitor infection rates and investigate any deviations.


Surgical Site Infection Improvement Programme overview [video] features an outline of the New Zealand HQSC SSI Improvement Programme by Dr Arthur Morris - Clinical Microbiologist and Chair of the Southern Cross Healthcare National Infection Prevention and Control Committee (NIPCC).