Welcome Message

We warmly welcome you to this website, whether you are a healthcare professional or an interested member of the public.

Through its contents, we aim to provide the best and most up-to-date information about the enormous collective effort behind ZSSIP. Thousands of healthcare professionals across Spain work together to prevent surgical infections, including specialists in Preventive Medicine, surgeons from every specialty, anaesthesiologists, healthcare managers, and surgical and operating-room nurses.

Surgery is a fundamental part of healthcare and is necessary to cure or improve a large number of conditions. However, it must be performed under the safest possible conditions, preventing potentially serious surgical site infections (SSIs). SSIs are frequent adverse events: 19 occur every hour in Spain and they affect 1 in 20 operated patients. They cause thousands of deaths each year and impose substantial costs on patients and the healthcare system, with an estimated €10,000–€12,000 in additional direct costs per SSI.

They are also largely preventable events—between 30% and 60%—when all currently known preventive measures are rigorously applied. The project’s name is itself a declaration of intent: we aspire to reduce the proportion of patients suffering an SSI to the lowest possible baseline, ideally zero, by combining effort and knowledge and implementing the bundles of preventive measures best supported by current scientific evidence.

In 2013, at the initiative of the Spanish Society of Preventive Medicine, Public Health and Health Management, a small group of hospitals decided to take action and implement the first ZSSIP protocols for the comprehensive prevention of SSIs. In 2016, the Ministry of Health began supporting the project and included it in the National Patient Safety Strategy. In 2017, ZSSIP began its journey as a nationwide project, being applied in practically all autonomous communities and endorsed by at least 12 scientific societies.

During 2017–2021, more than 130 hospitals formally expressed interest in the project, and 65 hospitals participated by providing data. More than 33,000 patients were followed up during that period, with the preventive recommendations applied. We estimate that implementation of the protocol in all Spanish hospitals could prevent 42,000 SSIs annually and save €407 million in additional costs associated with infections, prolonged stays, reoperations and readmissions.

Across the different sections of this website, you will find information about the participating centres, specific working protocols, training materials, scientific articles reviewed by experts, useful links, news and events related to ZSSIP, among other resources.

If you would like your hospital to participate in the project, a private area is available for entering hospital data, obtaining reports and resolving questions. For any other enquiries, please contact us at iqzeroinformacion@iqz.es.