Risk factors associated with surgical site infection following orthopaedic surgery in South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review protocol.

Objective: The objective of the scoping review will be to understand and describe risk factors associated with surgical site infection (SSI) in an orthopaedic surgery population in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa. This paper describes the protocol that will be used for the scoping review.

Method: A comprehensive literature search will be conducted using MEDLINE (PubMed), CINAHL (EBSCO), Embase and Cochrane Libraries to identify articles meeting the inclusion criteria, including both published and grey literature, in order to provide a broad overview of the reported risk factors associated with patients who have undergone an orthopaedic surgery with an outcome of SSI within 90 days of a procedure. Additional studies will be sourced by exploring the reference list of included eligible studies. By using a combination of the Population, Exposure, Outcome framework, terms and synonyms related to each category, in different variations, along with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) in the search strategy, identified comprehensive and relevant literature for the scoping review.

Results: It is anticipated the results will provide a baseline of risk factors that will inform the development of a risk assessment tool for clinical use.

Conclusion: This protocol will inform the development of a scoping review to describe factors associated with SSIs following orthopaedic surgery in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa.