title: Surgical wound infection rates: use caution when comparing.
abstract: 1. Comparing surgical wound infection (SWI) rates without a complete understanding of and at least a partial control for those factors that can account for observed variations can be misleading. 2. Variations in SWI rates can be attributed to patient-related factors, type of operation, differences in case finding, differences in definition of SWI, and chance variation. 3. Use of a risk stratification prior to rate calculation controls for intrinsic (patient-related) and extrinsic (operation-related) risk for the purpose of comparison.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bryant
mesh_terms: D015982:Bias; D004812:Epidemiologic Methods; D006801:Humans; D012307:Risk Factors; D013530:Surgical Wound Infection / Q000453:epidemiology*