A family friend was an R.N. in charge of one D.C.-area hospital's efforts to prevent infection. She said part of the problem was doctors who didn't bother to wash their hands.
That's surely true for in-patient care. However,
Operating Room personnel
do wash their hands very, very vigorously before donning (via sterile techniques) gowns, masks, caps, and gloves. During the operation, they touch nothing in the OR that has not been sterilized in preparation for the surgery. (That's why the TV shows depict gloved docs and nurses and scrub techs walking around with their hands held up in the air away from even their sterile gowns. And they never let their hands drop below the plane of the sterile operating field.)
One of the nasty problems about modern infections is that MRSA, although infectious by contact, often produces spontaneous infections with no known recent contact with MRSA. Some Infectious Disease doctors believe that some folks have MRSA colonizing their sinuses and that the abscesses that we see so often nowadays are somehow "metastasizing" via the bloodstream from the patient's sinuses.
Abscesses, whether post-surgical or not, are becoming a lot more common in my 20+ years of experience. I used to see about one pretty bad non-surgical, non-trauma-associated skin abscess per month in Urgent Care work, Now, I see about one per week.
Go figure.