Sometimes, people need a new hip or knee joint. This surgery usually helps, but in rare cases, the new joint can get infected. This is called a prosthetic joint infection.
These infections are serious and can cause pain, trouble walking, and more hospital visits. They can also be hard to treat.
Doctors usually treat these infections with another operation and a long course of antibiotics, but even then, the infection might not go away completely and can come back.
To choose the best antibiotic, doctors need to know what bacteria (germs) are causing the infection. It can take a few days to get this result, so doctors often start with antibiotics that work on the most common bacteria.
Over time, some bacteria have changed and become harder to kill with certain antibiotics. This is called antibiotic resistance, and it means that some of the usual antibiotics we use to treat infections don’t work anymore.
We want to study which bacteria are now causing these joint infections most often, and which antibiotics are still working to treat joint infections. This will help doctors to treat patients more effectively.