Healthcare-associated infections are diseases that may threaten the patient’s health during their presence in the clinic. There are pathogens that spread in the hospital between patients or from doctors to patients due to inappropriate treatment. There are methods to stop them: pathogens can be killed by chlorhexidine and other antimicrobial liquids, and handwashing with soap clears hands from most microbes.
Gloves and masks stop the pathogen transmission between people, isolating the body parts. Despite that, the problem is still present even in developed countries, where those methods are known and widely used. Goal 7 of the 2021 Patient Safety Goals is dedicated to reducing the risk of such infections based on hand hygiene guidelines of the CDC and WHO. Several specific goals may be suggested to realize this global goal and help medical workers in infection prevention.
Prevention requires the strict following of all rules of hygiene, which will destroy all potential pathogens. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) had extensive guidelines on how healthcare workers may prevent those infections (CDC, 2019; WHO, 2009). They describe how to prevent pathogen spread during surgery, blood sampling, wound treatment, how to wash hands and which liquids to use for disinfection.
Disposable gloves and masks should be used to prevent pathogen spread via skin and breath, respectively. While the number of such infections and deaths decreases as healthcare practices improve, there are still more than a million annual cases, and one in 17 of them dies (Haque et al., 2018). One can see that there is a large issue with healthcare-associated infections: despite clear guides on how to prevent them, they are still widespread in healthcare.
The main problem is that healthcare workers usually do not follow those requirements due to a lack of attention. While they understand what they should do and how they can prevent these diseases, there is a wide variety of such infections: respiratory, urinary, intestinal, and skin diseases (Haque et al., 2018). Doctors use gloves for treatment and disinfection liquids before and after it, but considering the wide variety of infections, it is hard to prevent them all (WHO, 2009).
A simple education about the importance of handwashing and disinfecting does not help much (Moralejo et al., 2018). The reason is that they already know they should do this, but they simply forget to prevent infection in all cases.
In my opinion, the situation may be improved by setting goals that will be easy-to-comply for medical workers and will not require much of their attention, focusing on their work. First, disinfection sites should be present in all rooms, and all doctors and patients should be instructed to treat their hands and instruments regularly. Second, disposable gloves and masks should be used in all contacts between doctors and patients or between patients. Together, those two goals ensure that as many pathogens as possible will be killed and those that will survive will not be transmitted. In addition, those measures are easy-to-follow and require no great spending: thus, they can be implemented efficiently.
Therefore, to reach Goal 7 and reduce the risk of health care-associated diseases, one needs to organize the easy-to-remember and easy-to-comply goals to clean their environment from pathogens. They must wash their hands and disinfect their clothes, tools, and hospital rooms. Patients’ clothes should also be disinfected to prevent the possible disease spread among the patients. I think that easy access to disinfection liquids and extensive usage of gloves and masks are primary goals that should be realized in all medical facilities. It will ensure that both patients and doctors will treat their hands regularly, killing pathogens and not transmitting them between people.
References
CDC. (2019). Hand hygiene guideline. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Web.
Haque, M., Sartelli, M., McKimm, J., & Abu Bakar, M. B. (2018). Health care-associated infections – an overview. Infection and Drug Resistance, Volume 11(11), 2321–2333. Web.
Moralejo, D., El Dib, R., Prata, R. A., Barretti, P., & Corrêa, I. (2018). Improving adherence to Standard Precautions for the control of healthcare-associated infections. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Web.
WHO. (2009). WHO guidelines on hand hygiene in health care. Web.