Your surgeon might be excellent. The hospital might still give you an infection.
Surgical site infections happen when systems fail—when corners get cut on sterilization, when protocols exist but aren't enforced, when the institutional commitment to preventing infection falls short of what patients deserve. About 2-5% of surgical patients develop infections at their surgical sites, and a substantial portion of these infections are preventable.
The System, Not Just the Surgeon
When patients think about surgical negligence, they usually picture an individual mistake—the surgeon's hand slipping, a wrong decision in the moment. Infection cases are different. They typically trace back to systemic failures: environmental breakdowns in operating room cleanliness and air filtration, sterilization processes that don't adequately process instruments between cases, protocols for antibiotic timing and skin preparation that aren't consistently followed, and staffing levels that leave nurses unable to maintain proper wound care.
These aren't failures of one person making one mistake. They're failures of institutions to maintain the systems that keep patients safe. And that distinction matters for how liability works—hospitals can't easily deflect responsibility onto individual nurses or technicians when the systems they built, or failed to build, allowed the infection to occur.
The Evidence of System Failure
Individual infection cases can be difficult to prove because infections sometimes happen even with perfect care. What makes cases stronger is evidence that systemic problems caused or contributed to your infection.
Hospitals are required to track surgical site infection rates, and this data is increasingly available to the public. If your facility has infection rates significantly above comparable hospitals, that suggests systemic issues rather than bad luck in individual cases. State health departments inspect hospitals and issue findings about sanitation deficiencies, sterilization problems, and protocol violations. Those inspection reports can be powerful evidence that the hospital knew about problems and failed to fix them.
Pattern evidence is particularly compelling. Multiple patients infected with the same organism around the same time suggests a common source—contaminated equipment, an infected staff member, environmental problems in the operating room. If others got the same infection you did during the same period, your case becomes much stronger.
MRSA and Drug-Resistant Infections
Certain infections carry strong implications for where they came from. MRSA—methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus—and other drug-resistant organisms are predominantly healthcare-associated. If you developed a MRSA infection at your surgical site without prior colonization, the hospital is the overwhelmingly likely source. You didn't bring that resistant organism from home; you acquired it where resistant organisms circulate—in the healthcare environment.
Drug-resistant infections also tend to be more serious, requiring longer treatment with more toxic antibiotics, longer hospital stays, and carrying higher risks of complications and death. The damages in these cases often exceed those from ordinary infections.
What Hospitals Should Do
Evidence-based infection prevention protocols are well-established and widely published. Prophylactic antibiotics should be administered within one hour before incision and discontinued appropriately after surgery. Surgical sites should be properly prepared with antiseptic solutions using validated techniques. Sterile technique must be maintained throughout the procedure. Post-operative wound care should follow established protocols. Hand hygiene compliance among all staff should be monitored and enforced.
When hospitals fail to implement these standard measures, they're liable when infections result. The protocols exist because decades of research prove they reduce infections. Choosing not to follow them isn't a reasonable professional judgment—it's negligence.
The Consequences
Surgical infections aren't minor inconveniences to be treated with a course of antibiotics. They mean extended hospitalization, sometimes weeks in the hospital instead of days at home. They often require additional surgeries to clean out infected tissue, drain abscesses, or remove infected hardware. IV antibiotics carry their own side effects and risks. Sepsis—the body's overwhelming response to infection—can require intensive care and can kill even previously healthy patients. Patients with joint replacements or other implants may need those devices removed entirely, losing the function the original surgery was supposed to provide. In severe cases, amputation becomes necessary. Some patients don't survive.
Making the Case
Infection claims require connecting the hospital's failures to your specific infection. This means obtaining antibiotic timing records to verify whether prophylaxis was given correctly, reviewing operative notes for documentation of sterilization and sterile technique, requesting facility infection rate data and comparing it to benchmarks, checking for health department findings around the time of your surgery, and identifying the infectious organism to assess its likely source.
Expert witnesses in infectious disease and surgery help establish what protocols should have been followed and how their violation led to your infection. The combination of documented protocol failures and an infection consistent with healthcare acquisition creates a compelling case for negligence.