Introduction
Patient care and safety are essential aspects of clinical practice. They need to be constantly maintained at a high level through effective and timely programs and strategies. Infections can cause significant complications in patients and substantial morbidity and mortality concerns. Hand hygiene is a simple but effective method of combating infectious diseases. This strategy can be quickly introduced and monitored in inpatient clinics. Compliance with hygiene protocols can significantly affect the risks of patients contracting infections.
Selected Issue
The problem that needs to be addressed is the need for patients and healthcare workers to adhere more to hand hygiene. Many people understand how important these procedures are, but only some follow them, even in medical institutions (Kendziora et al., 2020). Maintaining hygiene is a simple process that, at the same time, can make it much easier for staff to take care of people. Patients become vulnerable to infectious diseases as hygiene levels fall below recommended levels. They can combine with existing people and create health-threatening situations that are not always possible to cut down. This problem can often arise from factors such as lack of time, lack of knowledge, forgetfulness, or lack of positive reinforcement. Thus, patients begin to form negative habits that can lead to a permanent deterioration in hygiene.
Practice Changes
Monitoring and ongoing feedback can be helpful to innovations to address the problem of handwashing in clinics. These changes are necessary to ensure proper hygiene for all medical staff. Monitoring can be provided through a network of video cameras that will record how the staff washes their hands (Dagne et al., 2019). However, feedback is also crucial to this process, as providers should be able to challenge the calculations or ask questions (Kendziora et al., 2020). In practice, possible changes may require the installation of separate handwashing stations. Thus, it will be possible to provide greater convenience and observability of this process. At the same time, monitoring of handwashing and hygiene should be entrusted to management, which will apply penalties to those employees who do not devote sufficient time to hygiene.
Impact on Key Stakeholders
The proposed strategy has a profound effect on some of the organization’s stakeholders. Thus, healthcare providers in the form of clinic workers will take better care of their health and improve it. Feedback will also allow them to ask questions and make corrections that they feel are important. In addition, the changes will also affect patients whose risk of infection will be at a reasonably low level (Dagne et al., 2019). On the part of the clinic administration, the improvement may be associated with cost savings since the institution will spend less on eliminating the consequences of patient infection. Moreover, this practice will make the attention of regulatory authorities to the clinic less intense. A strategy to increase the frequency of handwashing is essential to allow patients to recover more quickly.
Conclusion
Hygiene is a significant issue that can be addressed in clinics in a number of ways, such as increased frequency of handwashing. Using this method, one can significantly reduce the likelihood of infection. Thus, it greatly facilitates the treatment of patients and can make it faster and better. This will also have an effect on other stakeholders, such as regulators and medical personnel. They will be able to see the difference by visiting the clinic.
References
Dagne, H., Bogale, L., Borcha, M., Tesfaye, A., & Dagnew, B. (2019). Hand washing practice at critical times and its associated factors among mothers of under five children in Debark town, northwest Ethiopia, 2018. Italian journal of pediatrics, 45, 1-7. Web.
Kendziora, B., Guertler, A., Ständer, L., Frey, S., French, L. E., Wollenberg, A., & Reinholz, M. (2020). Evaluation of hand hygiene and onset of hand eczema after the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in Munich. European Journal of Dermatology, 30, 668-673. Web.
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