Question

appropriate hand hygiene strategies, including potential factors for noncompliance. Review potential consequences for noncompliance (for both patients and staff members) and nosocomial infection development.

Answer 1

Hand hygiene strategies:

1. Habit: make washing hands an action automatically taken upon entering or leaving a patient care area.
2. Active feedback: leaders can provide feedback by reminding staff to wash hands, and celebrating improved hand hygiene.
3. "No one excused" : every staff member needs to be held accountable and responsible for proper hand hygiene.  
4. Data driven: monitoring adherence to hand hygiene policy and analyzing .to rule areas of improvement.
5. Systems: hand hygiene compliance is a system wide effort and protocols should be ingrained throughout the organization. The infrastructure of the systems should be designed in such a way that it is easier for clinicians to adhere to proper hand hygiene.

Factors for noncompliance of hand hygiene:

1. Feeling hurried , attending to emergent patient conditions.
2. Forgetting to hand wash.
3. Inconvenient placement of handrub or sink.
4. Perception that wearing gloves negated need for hand hygiene.
5. skin irritation from cleaning product
6. Workflow was not conducive to proper hand hygiene.

Potential consequences of hand hygiene :

1. Cold and flu: spread of microorganisms that cause influenza and common cold
2. Food poisoning an FC gastroentritis: poor hand hygiene can transmit campylobacter. It is spread by eating or drinking contaminated food, water or unpasteurised milk.
3. Impetigo: is a contagious infection of the skin that usually start with poor hand hygiene.
4. Hepatitis A: the disease develops when an infected person does not thoroughly wash his hands or handles food consumed by others.
5. Shigellosis: is a bacterial infection that spreads because of inappropriate hand washing technique or by injesting food contaminated by infected people.
6. Giardiasis: transmits as a result of hand to fecal contact or by drinking infected water from untreated sources.

Nosocomial infection development :

Nosocomial infection is a hospital acquired infection is an infection that is acquired in a hospital or health care facility. Infection gets spread to susceptible patient by various means.

Sources of Nosicomial infection: NI in surgical patient are to be due to contamination from hospital personnel or the environment.

The most common types of Nosicomial infections are urinary tract infection, surgical site infection, gastroenteritis, meningitis, pneumonia.

Prevention of Nosocomial infection:

• Handwashing as often as possible
• Stethoscope cleaning with alcohol swab
• Gloves supplement rather than replace handwashing
• Thorough disinfection of skin before insertion eg intravenous catheter.