Hand Hygiene Essential for Patient Care: Essay Sample

Introduction

Many health professionals and workers have described hand hygiene in health care settings as an essential tool in countering healthcare-related infections among patients. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), few definitive shreds of evidence exist on patient care activities capable of transmitting bacteria to health care workers (HCW). (Altura-Visan et al., 2017). However, multiple researches on the same field have identified many possibilities. Bacterial can come into contact with the hands of HCW after such activities, including respiratory care, secretions, intravascular cares, and various wound cares (Assab & Temime, 2016). Besides, bacterial infections can also be in HCW hands after being involved in activities like measuring the patient's temperature, pulse, and blood pressure (Fox et al., 2015). The paper evaluates the effectiveness of handwashing using soaps or alcohol sanitizers in preventing hospital-acquired infections.

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Bacteria in contact with HCW hands following the patient's contact range from clostridium difficile to Klebsiella spp (Haverstick et al., 2017). Notably, direct contact with a patient is not the only means through which this contraction occurs. According to literature, other means include touching contaminated surfaces, especially in the patient's environment (McLaws, 2015). Cleaning hands before and after getting in contact with the patient may seem a simple task in preventing bacterial infection. Many healthcare settings have put in place various hygienic policies to guide every employee, but the measures have not worked due to non-compliance (Sickbert-Bennett et al., 2016).

Considering various policies aimed at preventing hospital infection, one significant point to note about hand hygiene is that it can be used to prevent different types of bacterial infections or organisms (Tyagi et al., 2018). Moreover, many opportunities for hand hygiene exist but ignorance has jeopardized the initiative due to non-compliance. According to the center for disease control in every 25 patients, one is infected with healthcare-related infections while in the hospital (Ellina et al., 2018). Surprisingly, this figure translates to about 720,000 infections in a single year, and out of the number, 75,000 dies as a result of the infections (Girma et al., 2017).

The good news is that proven benefits exist relating to hand hygiene. It has been ascertained that, when health professionals wash their hands before delivering babies, death arising from women has significantly reduced (Ider et al., 2016). Therefore, hand hygiene using soap and alcohol-based sanitizers has been proven and tested and thus should be applied, and adequate compliance ensured. WHO has been at the forefront of championing various health campaigns and has issued sound outlines of hand hygiene (Mondol et al., 2015). The outline stipulated that hands should be cleaned before any aseptic task, before patient contact, after any fluid exposure, after patient contact and after contact with the environment.

Conclusion, Thoughts and Future Research

In conclusion, public health safety is a great concern to human existence, and from the review, it is evident that hand washing has more benefits in preventing various hospitals acquire infection despite not being followed to later. Therefore, healthcare settings with no policies of hand hygiene risk reporting many infections and even death of many patients. However, despite the guidelines and many types of research on this field, the compliance level is still an issue to address to eliminate bacterial infections (Sahiledengle et al., 2018). Ideally, future research on hand hygiene should focus on how more effective and reliable techniques that would ensure 100% compliance.

References

Altura-Visan, F., Zakaria, A., Castro, J., Alhasanat, O., Al Ismail, K., Al Ansari, N., & Hamed, M. (2017). SWITCH: Al Wakra Hospital Journey to 90% Hand Hygiene Practice Compliance, 2011-2015. BMJ Open Quality, 6(1), u211699-w4824. https://bmjopenquality.bmj.com/content/6/1/u211699.w4824?cpetoc=&utm_source=TrendMD&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=BMJ_Qual_Improv_Rep_TrendMD-1

Assab, R., & Temime, L. (2016). The role of hand hygiene in controlling norovirus spread in nursing homes. BMC infectious diseases, 16(1), 395.https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s12879-016-1702-0

Fox, C., Wavra, T., Drake, D. A., Mulligan, D., Bennett, Y. P., Nelson, C., ... & Bader, M. K. (2015). Use of a patient hand hygiene protocol to reduce hospital-acquired infections and improve nurses' hand washing. American Journal of Critical Care, 24(3), 216-224. http://ajcc.aacnjournals.org/content/24/3/216.full.pdf+html

Haverstick, S., Goodrich, C., Freeman, R., James, S., Kullar, R., & Ahrens, M. (2017). Patients' handwashing and reducing hospital-acquired infection. Critical care nurse, 37(3), e1-e8. http://ccn.aacnjournals.org/content/37/3/e1.full.pdf+html

McLaws, M. L. (2015). The relationship between hand hygiene and healthcare-associated infection: it isn't very easy. Infection and drug resistance, 8, 7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4319644/

Sickbert-Bennett, E. E., DiBiase, L. M., Willis, T. M. S., Wolak, E. S., Weber, D. J., & Rutala, W. A. (2016). Reduction of healthcare-associated infections by exceeding high compliance with hand hygiene practices. Emerging infectious diseases, 22(9), 1628. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4994356/

Tyagi, M., Hanson, C., Schellenberg, J., Chamarty, S., & Singh, S. (2018). Hand hygiene in hospitals: an observational study in hospitals from two southern states of India. BMC public health, 18(1), 1299. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-018-6219-6

Ellina, A. D., Rusmawati, A., & Fawzi, A. (2018). The Analysis of Hand Washing Behavior Observed from the Knowledge and Nurse's Attitude in the Emergency Unit of Mokopido Toli Toli Hospital. The 2nd Joint International Conferences (Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 770-776).

Girma, H., Getenet, B., & Zeleke, M. (2017). Prevalence of intestinal parasites among food handlers at the cafeteria of Jimma University specialized hospital, Southwest Ethiopia. Asian Pac J Trop Dis, 7(8), 1-5.

Ider, B. E., Baatar, O., Rosenthal, V. D., Khuderchuluun, C., Baasanjav, B., Donkhim, C., ... & Sodnomdarjaa, B. (2016). Multicenter study of device-associated infection rates in hospitals of Mongolia: Findings of the International Nosocomial Infection Control Consortium (INICC). American journal of infection control, 44(3), 327-331.

Mondol, M. A. S., & Stankovic, J. A. (2015, August). Harmony: A hand wash monitoring and reminder system using smartwatches. In Proceedings of the 12th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services on 12th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking, and Services (pp. 11-20).

ICST (Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering).

Sahiledengle, B., Gebresilassie, A., Getahun, T., & Hiko, D. (2018). Infection prevention practices and associated factors among healthcare workers in governmental healthcare facilities in Addis Ababa. Ethiopian Journal of health sciences, 28(2), 177-186.