Role of the Nurses in Infection Control-Free-Samples for Students

Question: Discuss about the Role of the Nurses in Infection Control. Answer: Introduction: The issue of hospital cleanliness has been prevalent for years. People have been sharing their concern about the hospital cleanliness and hospital acquired infections. The WHO (World Health Organization) has also recognized the problem. Patients are the primary concern for the nurses, as they have to stay near to the patients for almost 24 hours and 7 days in every circumstance. Albeit the presence of the caregivers, the patients are not safe just because they are present in the hospital setting. The report will highlight the involvement of nurses in infection control. This report will also discuss the overall guideline for infection control. Background: In the year of 1854, Florence Nightingale first identified the relationship between nursing and hygiene while serving at a military hospital in Scutari. She assumed that if the hygienic condition of the hospital improves, the mortality rate among the soldiers would also decrease. Discussion: Every nurse should know about the basics of infection control. Every hospital should have an infection control nurse who would maintain the extent of infection control in the hospital. The hospital authority and the infection control nurse should have to follow a program to educate the other nurses and ward staff. How to promote the infection control practice in hospitals: There are many hospital-acquired infections, which cannot be prevented, but there are some, which can. Any pathogen infection has three elements to consider- a source, a host and the way of transmission. As small children, we learn the most basic lesson of personal hygiene to prevent the infection, which is hand hygiene. Despite every healthcare workers and nurses knows about hand hygiene, it can be seen that the healthcare workers of many remote area does not wash their hands properly. There are three basic strategies, which is simple enough to use and implement for the infection control in the hospitals, that is, education, intervention and evaluation (Krein et al 2012). Education: The most basic practice for any strategy is knowledge. The healthcare workers including the nurses should acquire the basic knowledge about hygiene before implementing it in a hospital setting. The hygiene promotion posters, videos, conference and diagrams can provide the required knowledge to the healthcare. The nurses should acquire a degree in infection control apart from earning a bachelor degree in nursing. The criteria of being an infection control nurse should include experience, which can be acquired through volunteering in any clinical setting (Sargenti et al. 2015). Intervention: The hospital management should imply varieties of intervention to ensure that the healthcare workers are maintaining the common hygiene. The hospital management should place alcohol based hand sanitizer in every room of the hospital, including the waiting rooms and the staff workstation. There should be automatic sinks placed to the exit of each room. The staffs should clean the frequently handled equipments using some alcohol based wipes (Scherbaum et al. 2014). Evaluation: To evaluate the situation, the hospital authority should use the surveillance system to monitor if the nurses are maintaining the basic hygiene in the hospital. The nurse managers should spot check the compliance (Anderson 2014). The idea of an infection control program: The health authority of the country or the province should build up a program to support the hospitals to reduce the infection risk. These programs must have to develop and update the guidelines to upgrade the evaluation system. The program should have set relevant objectives about infection control. The program should review all the risks, which is associated with new technologies. The program should also include the monitoring program that would evaluate the risk of acquiring an infection. The infection control manual: Every hospital should have a manual containing the instructions about the infection control system. This manual should also contain the common practices, which are used in an ideal healthcare setting to avoid infections. An experienced infection control nurse should write this manual. This manual should also be upgraded every year and the committee should review this upgradation (Franck et al. 2015). Skills of the infection control nurses: An infection control nurse should acquire multi-tiered skills and nursing experience to know about the basic epidemiology of the disease, the origin of the disease and the causes of the disease (Scherbaum et al. 2014). An infection control nurse should- Monitoring: An infection control nursing staff should monitor the clinical setting to see if there is any occurrence of infection there. The infection control nurse should keep all the data about the patients and the types of the infection occurrence (Jacqueline, and Dyan 2009). Prevention: An infection control staff has to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines andthe Centers of Medicare Services (CMS) guidelines to ensure that the hospital setting is working to reduce the infection occurrence. Reporting: The reporting task can be distributed to many levels as every healthcare professional and the nurses should take records and evaluate the situation of the acquired infection to the bottom level. This information can be relayed to the infection control committees to evaluate the ongoing procedures and the policies (Alfa et al. 2015). Adherence: This process is also a multi-level task as the hospital authority should revaluate if the nursing staffs are adhering to the guidelines for infection control. The infection control nurses should take charge and evaluate every setting of the hospital to make sure that if the infection control guidelines are being followed. Common precautions to be taken by the nurses: The nurses should take some common precaution to treat every patient in the hospital. The standard practice should involve those facilities, which are needed to provide the patients with protection from the hospital germs (Dancer 2014). The facility should include antiseptic and alcohol based hand sanitizer. Every nurse should own their own protective equipments while handling blood, and other bodily substances such as urine and stool. The nurses should maintain the cleanliness of the hospital. The nurses should handle the waste products properly. The linens of the hospital beds should be washed with proper detergent and should be soaked in an antiseptic solution to remove the germ. Conclusion: In a hospital setting, a healthcare worker frequently comes across patients with pathogens and the pathogens are transmitted from one patient to another patient. This problem is becoming huge day by day and might not go away in a moment. Although, this problem is avoidable if the nurses takes the initiative and devote their ample time to the infection control program. This should reduce the risk of hospital-acquired infections among the patients. References: Alfa, M.J., Lo, E., Olson, N., MacRae, M. and Buelow-Smith, L., 2015. Use of a daily disinfectant cleaner instead of a daily cleaner reduced hospital-acquired infection rates.American journal of infection control,43(2), pp.141-146. Anderson, T., 2014.Effectiveness of Hand Washing Among Healthcare Workers to Reduce Hospital-acquired Infections. Grand Canyon University. Dancer, S.J., 2014. Controlling hospital-acquired infection: focus on the role of the environment and new technologies for decontamination.Clinical microbiology reviews,27(4), pp.665-690. Franck, K.T., Nielsen, R.T., Holzknecht, B.J., Ersbll, A.K., Fischer, T.K. and Bttiger, B., 2015. Norovirus genotypes in hospital settings: differences between nosocomial and community-acquired infections.The Journal of infectious diseases,212(6), pp.881-888. Jacqueline, M.S. and Dyan, B., 2009. Infection control: Can nurses improve hand hygiene practices?.University of Calgary, Faculty of Nursing. Krein, S.L., Kowalski, C.P., Hofer, T.P. and Saint, S., 2012. Preventing hospital-acquired infections: a national survey of practices reported by US hospitals in 2005 and 2009.Journal of general internal medicine,27(7), pp.773-779. Sargenti, K., Prytz, H., Strand, A., Nilsson, E. and Kalaitzakis, E., 2015. Healthcare?associated and nosocomial bacterial infections in cirrhosis: predictors and impact on outcome.Liver International,35(2), pp.391-400. Scherbaum, M., Ksters, K., Mrbeth, R.E., Ngoa, U.A., Kremsner, P.G., Lell, B. and Alabi, A., 2014. Incidence, pathogens and resistance patterns of nosocomial infections at a rural hospital in Gabon.BMC infectious diseases,14(1), p.124