Hospital Acquired Infections: A Case Study

Through medical advances in technology and practice, nurses have been afforded the opportunity to provide lifesaving care to patients. However, this lifesaving care comes with the risk of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). Generally speaking, HAIs are infections directly related with the delivery of healthcare and are often caused by viral, bacterial or

Hospital acquired infections (HAI) will begin to display signs and symptoms within 48 hours. In order to treat the infections, physicians need to diagnostic tools quickly. The manufacturer of new diagnostic test makers, Kalorama Information stated last year that the world demand for testing and treatment of HAI will be over 10 billion dollars by the year 2015, increasing from 9 billion dollars in 2010. Kalorama also stated that HAI has a 5% infection rate of 40 million hospital visits a year, causing 100,000 deaths in the U.S. annually (Kalorama Information, July 14, 2011). Early diagnosis will improve the patient's outcome and decrease the chance of death. According to Kalorama, 20-30% of the HAI can be prevented by the simple use of better hand washing and cross contamination avoidance although the others need more intensive changes such as hospital ventilation systems and using more disposable supplies (Kalorama Information, p. 113) .

As a hospital, quality care should be a priority for patients that are going to be treated for a sickness, or any type of procedure that is going to take place. A lot of times a patient gets an infection while they were at the hospital, on top of being treated for what they original came in for. Health facilities should be environments of healing, which they are, but they also have tons of various types of germs and infections, which grasp onto individuals that have weak immune systems/are sick. Some infections that are at hospitals are Tuberculosis, VRE, VAP, C-Diff, UTI, and MRSA. Preventive measures to stop the spread of the infections is lacking tremendously in the work and aim to provide safety for all patient’s health. The work

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to review the updated Association of Perioperative Registered Nurses (AORN) recommended practices for prevention of transmissible infections in the perioperative practice setting to help perioperative nurses apply the recommendations in daily practice.

There are multiple reasons that play into patients acquiring these infections. One of those reasons being the characteristics of the patients. For example infants, the elderly, people with compromised immune systems, and patients that have devices inserted for therapeutic purposes are all at greater risk to contract an infection (Feasey & Molyneux, 2011). The devices that are inserted for therapeutic purposes are a huge factor related to hospital acquired infections. Urinary catheters are the top device to cause an infection; in fact 97% of urinary tract infections are due to catheterization. 87% of people that obtain a bloodstream infection receive the infection from a central line. Lastly 83% of pneumonia acquired in the hospital is linked to the use of mechanical ventilation (Chang et al., 2011). Then there is the health care worker side that plays into effect. One of the number one reasons an infection is created or spread is because a health care worker did not properly wash his or her hands or their patient’s hands. This seems like an obvious way to prevent an infection but yet it still remains one of the top factors that leads to a hospital acquired infection. Hand hygiene is not the only hygienic issue. Health care workers do not always follow proper personal protective equipment guidelines. They may not always don gloves when

Hospital acquired infections are spread by numerous routes including contact, intravenous routes, air, water, oral routes, and through surgery. The most common types of infections in hospitals include urinary tract infections (32%),

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), one out of twenty five patients have obtained a health care associated infection (HAI) during their visit at a healthcare facility. This is approximately 1.7 million HAIs per year, just including the United States. From these incidents, roughly 17% result in death (Allen, 2015). Healthcare associated infections have become a major patient safety issue around the world. Patients are obtaining infections under the care of healthcare professionals when they are seeking help for a non-related issue. HAIs are some of the most common

Every executive in the hospital should be concerned about patient safety. Adverse drug events (ADEs) are costly, both in human terms and money. The cost of each ADE is significant, according to The Leapfrog Group (2014), each “ADE adds more than $2,000 on average to the costs of hospitalization.” As CFO, I need to balance the cost of new technology with patient safety. As CFO, I would like to have some incentives to implement these costly CPOE systems; however, these incentives may not help Suburban hospital improve quality of care. Lee et al. (2012). Found that the CMS policy to decrease payments to providers based on in-hospital infection rates “had no measurable effect on infection rates in U.S. hospitals.”

For over a decade, healthcare associated infections (HAIs) have been at the forefront for improvement in hospitals across the nation, with central line associated blood stream infections (CLABSI) being a frontrunner of HAIs investigated as a major area for improvement. A central line can be either a central venous catheter (CVC) or a peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) and has many uses in intensive care units, inpatient units, and home health care including administration of antibiotics, TPN, and chemotherapy treatment. Remarkable improvements over the past decade have been made in order to shrink the rate of CLABSIs with measures and ongoing research to continue to diminish the number of central line infections seen in hospitals.

Surgical site infections occur when a patient experiences infection following surgery, often as a direct result of the care received in a hospital or other medical facility. While these infections can often be easily treated while the patient is still at the hospital, the incidences of these infections can have significant and lasting impacts on patients and the hospital itself, even resulting in a patient’s death if the infection is not detected and treated appropriately. Since these infections occur while patients are under the care of professionals and during hospital stays, it is imperative that all involved in patient care follow procedures and policies established by the facility to reduce the risk of infections in patients. This involves not only information about surgical site infections and their prevention, but the impact of these infections on patients, hospitals, and staff members, as well as how surgical site infections impacts a facility’s accreditation. The purpose of this paper is to discuss surgical site infections, the implications of their occurrences at hospitals, accreditation expectations, and outcomes related to cost and quality.

Hospital acquired or nosocomial infections are defined as “infections acquired in hospitals or other healthcare facilities. To be classified with a nosocomial infection, the patient must have been admitted for reasons other than the infection. He or she must have shown no sign of active or incubating infection.” (Stubblefield, 2014) Due to the increased rate of preventable hospital acquired infections Medicaid has changed their policy on how to reimburse hospitals. In 2008, they “created a new rules denying hospital reimbursement for costs

ill patients are at risk of getting further diseased by a number of hospital infections. Patients

Surgical site infection (SSI) has been the most frequently occurring, healthcare-associated infection (HAI), causing 21.8% of reported infections in the United States (Magill et al. 2014). Despite the advances made in antimicrobial drugs, asepsis, sterilization and operative techniques, SSI continues to be a major problem in all branches of surgery in the hospitals (Saeed et al. 2015).

Hospital acquired infections or HAIs are one of the main contributing factors that made health care organizations realize the need to continuously revise and improve infection control strategies. Infection control practices extend from the very simple proper hand washing techniques to the more complex decolonization processes to eradicate reservoirs of these pathogens, especially drug resistant strains like MRSA. For patients, a HAI can lead to very dangerous complications and in the case of drug resistant strains there’s an increased potential for prolonged treatment, sepsis and risk of death. This is why in recent years health insurance companies have been refusing to pay for the treatment of suspected HAIs which leaves the cost to fall on

: Hospital acquired infections remain a costly problem. Each year there are approximately 2 million hospital acquired infections, 90,000 of which are fatal 1. Catheter-related bloodstream infections alone represent a potential burden on the healthcare system of at least $35billion 2. The main challenge is to prevent bacteria growth early before biofilm production takes place, since once the bacterial biofilm matrix forms, bacterial infections can become profoundly more resistant to the host defenses as well as antibiotic treatments 3. Barium sulfate (BaSO4) is a common agent used to make medical tubing radiopaque; however, in addition to this, BaSO4 polymeric formulations have been shown to exhibit antimicrobial activity4. Additional studies