Infection control practices in the hospital and community setting
Discuss infection control practices in the hospital and community setting. Include a variety of infectious threats in these setting and how the RN can mitigate them.
Example of infectious threats with a high impact in the hospital setting are MRSA, VRE & C-Diff. Those in the community are diseases such as COVID, influenza & Hepatitis C
ORDER A CUSTOM WRITTEN PAPER WITH US
Infection Control Practices
Infection control practices involve clinical strategies used by healthcare workers to prevent health-associated infections in hospitals and home care based settings. Healthcare-associated infections greatly affect healthcare delivery through their quality and safety (Tartari et al.,2021). Most of these infections are related to the hospital setup as compared to the community. Patients acquire these infections while undertaking medical treatment or surgeries in a hospital scenery.
Control Practices in the Community and Hospital
Infection control practices of health-associated infections are more likely the same at the hospital and community level; there might be a little different due to the different infectious threats. According to the World Health Organization, hand hygiene is the most common practice that needs to be observed by both the health practitioners and patients at the hospital and community level. (Haque et al.,2018).
Registered nurses tend to wash their hands before touching any treatment equipment and handling patients to reduce the chances of infectious bacteria spreading to the patients during treatment. On the other hand, community members are at a higher risk of contracting an infectious disease like the covid-19 virus and methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus if they do not wash their hands with clinically proven soap and enough running water observe environmental hygiene. Therefore, both the community and health workers have an obligation of observing these control measures to prevent such infectious diseases.
Proper use of catheters is very important in managing high-quality care during medical treatment and surgeries procedures. Registered nurses have tried to enhance proper use of this equipment by ensuring they wear protective clothing and gloves before surgical procedures. In addition, they try to use catheters only when necessary and cleans them as soon as possible and clean the skin area where the catheters are being inserted. Proper use of catheters helps in reducing infectious threats and promoting quality health care.
References
Haque, M., Sartelli, M., McKimm, J., & Bakar, M. A. (2018). Healthcare-associated infections–an overview. Infection and drug resistance, 11, 2321. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6245375/
Tartari, E., Tomczyk, S., Pires, D., Zayed, B., Rehse, A. C., Kariyo, P., … & Allegranzi, B. (2021). Implementation of the infection prevention and control core components at the national level: a global situational analysis. Journal of Hospital Infection, 108, 94-103. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195670120305491