A simple point score for definition of the risk of postoperative complications

During a 5-year-period we recorded prospectively 5,823 patients who had undergone general surgery and documented the postoperative complications as wound infection, pneumonia, reoperations and death. A score including all these complications was developed to evaluate the risk of an operation more exactly than using the wound infection rate alone. This method seems to provide a continuous monitoring and the comparison of the complication risks of certain operations within a quality assurance program. For gastric and colon surgery we found a correlation between postoperative antibiotic use and score, but not between score and postoperative hospitalization time.