A prospective study of 712 consecutive surgeries carried out in the Department of Surgery of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital, Nnewi over a one-year period was done. The aim was to determine the incidence of wound infection among surgical patients, to characterize the bacterial flora of the affected wounds and to identify possible factors that may influence the wound infection rate using the Study on the Efficacy of Nosocomial Infection Control (SENIC) and the National Nosocomial Infection Surveillance System (NNIS) indices. Seventy-six (10.56%) of the 712 surgical wounds studied developed wound infection. The clean wound infection rate was 4.89%. Surgical procedures with high infection rates include Orthopaedic surgery (20.93%), Urology (20%) and patients who had laparotomy (13.79%). Coliform organisms were the most predominant organism (54.32%), followed by Staphylococcus aureus (20.99%) and anaerobic organisms (7.40%). No growth was observed in 17.28% of the infected wounds. Factors associated with the development of infection include American Society of Anaesthesiologist (ASA) Score III or IV (p=0.042), long duration of surgery (p=0.29) and contaminated operations (p=0.01). Both the SENIC (p=0.006) and NNIS (p=0.025) indices were predictive of development of wound infection.