Infectious Disease Prevention And Control

| UNIT 4222- 264 THE PRINCIPLES OF INFECTION PREVENTION AND CONTROL | | | |

As a leader in health care, it is important that employees have the proper education and training for compliance with infection control. An infection control practitioner should be assigned surveillance of infections, calculate infection rates, and report these numbers to the appropriate personnel. Clinical nurses, such as nurses, should have periodic evaluations to ensure they are practicing patient safety. There are many other key factors that should be implemented in health care facilities to improve infection control. First is hand hygiene; there could be random observers periodically monitoring a certain floor or department for hand sanitation practices. Secondly, is the health care environment. This includes, making sure employees are sanitizing surfaces and equipment, educating visitors and families on infection control measures, and properly using personal protective equipment. Improper use, wear, and removal of personal protective equipment can cause serious health consequences to the worker and the patients, which means employees need be continuously trained and educated on this equipment.

Stephanie Ardito, after learning about three MRSA infections in her neighbor, decides to research on hospital infections. She found alarming high numbers of HAIs spread. For example, in 2009, of 1.8 million people that acquired HAIs, 100,000 of them died. HAIs also place an additional burden on hospitals. A research in 2010 estimated a $4.4 billion of additional hospital care resulting from treating HAIs. Quoting from an article titled “Staying Safe in the Hospital,” Ardito lists actions that patients can take in order to prevent HAIs. Patients should monitor their medication intake, medical test results, follow-up treatment plans; look for coordinated care from multiple caregivers; follow methods to prevent infections, specially washing hand; speak up to physician when there is a concern about HAIs; and to insist on discharging to prevent hospital readmission. This article is a great combination of many statistics from many researches, providing evidences for a growing issue of HAIs. Lastly, the author also compiles

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

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

The priority nursing diagnosis of hospital acquired infection is risk for any kind of infection. One of the main goals for each patient in the hospital is the patient will remain free of infection as evidence by absence of heat, pain, redness, or swelling in any area of the patient’s body during each nurse’s shift. (care plan book). Frequently hand washing is the best intervention for preventing infection. Hand washing reduces the risk of transmission of pathogens by inhibiting the growth of or killing the microorganisms. (cb)Proper sterile technique during urinary

Healthcare-associated infection has been an issue in many facilities throughout the years. It is a health risk to patients and very costly to the facilities. In order to improve and make changes to the amount of infections that the facilities have you must first change the staff and facilities view of preventing healthcare-associated infection.

Healthcare associated infection is a more concealed problem that yet no health care organisation or nation can announce to have resolved it (World Health Organization, 2011). In emergency departments and intensive care units 30% of patients are suffered from minimum one episode of nosocomial infections with associated morbidity and mortality (World Health Organization, 2011, p. 3). Strong evidences are available that hospital acquired infections can be prevented and burden can be reduced up to 50% or more (World Health Organization, 2011). Australian national quality and safety health service standard no.3 emphasize prevention and control of hospital associated infections. Most of hospital acquired infections in intensive care units are associated

The reason for this paper is to find out what hospital acquire infection is, the harmful effects it can cause and the active role nurses can take to help prevent this types of infection. Nosocomial infection is not an infection the patients were admitted with but appeared 48 hours or more during admission in the hospital. The infection is caused by organisms that invade the patient’s body defense mechanism, which can happened by an invasive procedures, cauterizations, or wounds etc.

Hospital acquired infections (HAIs) are infections a person get while in the hospital, however the infection must occur forty-eight hours after admission because of the incubation period of infections (Shang, Stone, & Larson, 2015). HAIs provide an unnecessary risk to patient safety (Center for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2016). Every day at least one out of twenty-five patients in hospitals across the United States (U.S.) acquires an HAI (CDC, 2016). HAIs leads to many problems in hospitals across the U.S. One problem is HAIs can lead to patients’ deaths. In 2011 722,000 people developed at least one HAI, over half happened outside of the intensive care unit, and around 75,000 of the 722,000 died while in the hospital

Healthcare acquired infections are a concern in healthcare facilities. Organizational changes can influence infection prevention. There are several quality and safety interventions that can assist with reducing infection transmission, such as hand washing. In general, the longer a patient remains in the hospital the sicker they become. Many of the uncomplicated admissions become complicated after an extended hospital stays. Nursing home patients are generally admitted to a facility based on overall decline in health, but soon experience community acquired infections from the facility. Implementation of infection control by involving the interdisciplinary staff members can decrease the occurrence of infection.

Infection control within a healthcare facility is the prevention of the spread of many microorganisms from patient to patient, patient to a member of staff and also from the staff member to the patient that are in there care. The World Health Organisation have defined healthcare associated infections as an infection occurring in a patient in a hospital or other healthcare facility in whom the infection was not present or incubating at the time of admission. Every healthcare facility from hospitals to general practitioners office should have a designated member of staff or a team of people who ensure that the infection control procedures are abided by and adhered to at all times in order to protect both staff and patients. More than 300,000 people each year are affected by a healthcare associated infection and the cost of treatment for these patients is over £3,000 and there is also the cost of treatment after discharge.

Since the manual handling task requires close contact with the patient, all handlers should follow strict infection control protocols in ICU. A recent study showed that by strictly following infection control protocols the incidence of hospital-acquired infections could be reduced (8). In addition, an observational study concluded that better hospital-wide infection control would reduce the number of MRSA-positive patients admitted to ICU and acquisition of MRSA within ICU (9). Therefore, it is important to minimize the spread of the infection by performing the following aseptic techniques.

Hospitals know that germs are destructive and can hinder, impede and even destroy a patient’s health if left untreated. So they provide the appropriate measures to fight the infiltration of these destructive agents.

While not all healthcare settings infections can be prevented, a large t majority of them can be if preventative measures are taken. The chain of transmission of microorganisms consists of three elements: a source of infection, the microorganisms, a susceptible host, and a mode of transmission of the microorganism. The most basic strategy for prevention of infection is something that most of us learn while we were still young children: hand hygiene. Three major strategies that can be used to promote effective infection control practices in community setting