Pre-operative risk assessment of SSI after cardiac surgery
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Multi-centre assessment of existing pre-operative risk assessment tools for predicting surgical site infection after cardiac surgery
IRAS ID
294270
Contact name
Julie Sanders
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Barts Health NHS Trust
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
NCT04762446, ClinicalTrials.gov ID
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 2 months, 31 days
Research summary
Surgical site infections (SSI) are serious complications accounting for 20% of all the healthcare-associated infections and are considered the second most frequent type of hospital-acquired infection in Europe and the United States. SSI after cardiac surgery is associated with delays to patient’s discharge, readmissions and re-operations; and can result in increased hospital costs for staffing, diagnostics and treatment.
Risk assessment has been identified as potentially useful intervention in SSI prevention and in identifying at risk populations who may benefit from specific interventions to reduce this possible complication of cardiac surgery. However, there is currently a lack of evidence as to which risk tools are the most valid and reliable to be used in clinical practice. We developed and locally validated the Barts Heart Centre Surgical Infection Risk (B-SIR) tool to include patients with various types of cardiac surgeries. We found that the B-SIR tool is a better tool in predicting SSI risk compared with the existing cardiac risk tools in our population.
However, it is recognised in the literature that the predictive performance of a risk model tends to vary across settings, populations and periods. Hence, we aim to do a multi-centre validation of our newly developed B-SIR tool and apply all the other tools (Australian Cardiac Risk Index and Brompton and Harefield Infection Score) to identify what tool performs best that we can potentially use for the UK population. Further, the outcome of the study will be beneficial to future cardiac surgery patients to assess their risk of developing SSI and help us identify those patients who may benefit from specific interventions. We will use existing patients’ data, which will be anonymised, from the participating cardiac centres to analyse and compare the performance of each risk tools.
REC name
London - Brent Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
21/PR/0741
Date of REC Opinion
9 Jun 2021
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion