Hand Hygiene As A Method Of Reducing Nosocomial Infections

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Introduction

Hospital-acquired infections are becoming a major challenge in many hospitals and health facilities in the United States. These health care facilities are dangerous places where patients acquire infections. A recent report by the United States Center for diseases control and prevention indicates that one in every twenty-five patients suffer from the hospital acquired infections. The most common nosocomial infections are respiratory infections, gastrointestinal infections, surgical wound infections, and genital urinal infections. These infections are as a result of breaches of infection control practices and unclean and non-sterile services. Millions of medical procedures are carried out in hospitals and other health care facilities every. With the procedures, legal suits arising from hospital-acquired infections are on the increase. However, most of these hospital-acquired infections are preventable if both the staff and the patients observe personal hygiene and correct washing of hands. According to the United States CDC and prevention, correct hand washing is the primary measure of preventing the spread ...
... of pathogens.

Hospitals should adopt a program that ensures that all hospital staff observe personal hygiene and thoroughly wash hands and any skin surface exposed after contact with any potential infectious materials. Similarly, patients should know the effectiveness of washing hands after visiting the washroom in reducing possible infections or re-infections. In addition, hospitals should use proper methods of drying the hands after washing to limit the spread of pathogens. A health care facility can adopt a plan that aims at encouraging personal hygiene within the facility. The plan involves sensitizing hospital staff together with the patients about the importance of observing hygienic by washing hands after visiting the toilets or after coming into contact with any potential infectious materials. Hospitals can also provide hand washing equipments in strategies locations in order to make hand washing a routine.

Change Model Overview

The Johns Hopkins Nursing EBP Model is a problem-solving approach used in clinical decision making process. The JHNEBP process has three components that include practice question, evidence, and translation. The model consists of two tools used to appraise evidence by evaluating the quality of evidence. The tools include research evidence and non-research evidence appraisal. Nurses should use this model as a guide to facilitate the changes since the model helps them to identify the problem, get the evidence to support their ideas and translate the evidence.

Practice question:

Does washing hands and observing hand hygiene by both the nursing staff and the patients reduce the chances of acquiring hospital infections?

Scope of practice question

Most of the hospital-acquired infections are as a result of poor hand hygiene within the health care workers. Hands are the primary route of transmission of nosocomial micro-organisms. As a result, improvement of hand hygiene is a high priority of the world health organization. WHO initiated a worldwide patient safety initiative in 2006 and hand washing is among the five foremost goals of the initiative? Hand washing and disinfecting reduces the rate of infections if health care staff washes their hands before starting work and after finishing work. At the University of Geneva, there was a reduction in the frequency of hospital-acquired infections by 40 percent over a compliance rate from 48 percent to 66 percent over a period of five years. Thus, there is a need for hospitals to comply with the WHO directive of observing hands hygiene in hospitals in order to reduce the rates of hospital-acquired infections.

The team

In order to implement the plan, an eight-member team is required. The team will consist of one member of the board of management of the hospital, a member of the department of finance and the rest of the members will nurses from different medical departments of the hospital. The members of the team will be volunteers who have a similar objective of seeing a reduction in the hospital acquired infection rates. The member of the management board will oversee the whole project to success while the other member of the department of finance will be the financial adviser to the team. The nurses from the different departments will oversee the actual implementation of the plan.

Carolyn Morgan is the author of this paper. A senior editor at Melda Research in nursing research paper writing service. if you need a similar paper you can place your order for a custom research paper from custom nursing writing service.

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