[Quality assurance in surgery by prospective assessment of the risk of complications by a simple point score].

3654 general surgical interventions were prospectively registered during a 40 month period. Postoperative complications (wound infection, pneumonia, reoperation, mortality) were recorded and were quantified numerically by a complication score which describes the precise number of complications per ten operations. In this way the risk of a single operation can be monitored continuously and quality control programs can do without classification of operations in clean, contaminated and dirty interventions. The length of postoperative hospital stay and the amount of postoperatively applied antibiotics correlated well with the score.