Introduction
According to the Center for Disease Control (2014), approximately 1 million Americans get the healthcare associated infection while receiving medical care. These infections have sky rocketed the health care cost to great heights. In order to counter and enhance patient safety, CDC has continued to target a number of the untreatable as well as drug resistant infections which are a great threat to patient safety. Therefore, there is a need to put in place measures aimed at preventing the hospital associated infections. This paper will therefore focus on one of the major Health care and public health issues which is Healthcare-Associated Infections in protecting the life and safety of the patients.
Healthcare-Associated Infections
Health care associated infections are one of the major public health issues being experienced today. Both the occurrence as well as the complications which come from the health care associated infections has continued to escalate. These infections in most cases develop while the patient is undergoing treatment. These infections result in patient illness and increases both morbidity and mortality of patient as well as the patient over staying in the hospital and having additional diagnostic and therapeutic interventions which increases their health care cost. Health care infections are undesirable outcome in health since they are preventable (Magill et al., 2014). These infections are highly considered as one of the health care indicators which clearly indicate on how safe the patient is.
Indeed there is a great concern in terms of patient safety while in the hospital. According to Magill et al. (2014), one of the most frequent events which commonly associated with safety of the hospitalized patients includes the issue of drug adverse, nosocomial infections as well as complications coming from the surgical complications. As a result of the recent changes instituted in the medical settings where medical services have been concentrated to the outpatient department, there has been a decline in the infections associated with hospital admissions. With increased admission healthcare associated infections increases. This is due to breakages of infection prevention measures which is supposed to be implemented by the health care personnel (Hedrick & Sawyer, 2005). Therefore in order to enhance patient safety while in the hospital, health care personnel should take appropriate measure of ensuring that the patients are safe guarded from any form of infection which might arise while being admitted in the hospital.
Great surveillance has been instituted in respect to the monitoring of health care associated infections in health care setting. This therefore, a great concern should be instituted in order to help in the management of the health care associate infections. In order to reduce these infections, there is a need to use the already published data regarding their prevention as well as how they should be effectively managed. According to Magill et al. (2014), reporting of the health care associated infection has been done for a long time. Therefore, enough measures should be already in place in order to ensure that these infections are eliminated. The changing trends in respect to health care associated infections need to take seriously in order to ensure that these infections are dealt with appropriately. Despite the increasing demands of ensuring that health care workers institute proper preventive measures for the infections, healthcare associated infections continues to be a major issue in terms of promoting and improving patient safety.
There has been a growing a demand on the part of the legislators to enact appropriate laws aimed at controlling and properly managing the health care associated infections. According to a report by Moro (2006), healthcare infections were marked to be highly associated with the patient safety. Therefore there is a great need for the hospital to provide information which will guide in the assessment of the patient safety especially while they are being managed in the hospital (Horan, Andrus, & Dudeck, 2008). Appropriate policies need to be put in place in order to make sure that hospital uphold the issue of patient safety with the required amount of caution. Upholding of patient safety is one step which should be taken especially in preventing health care associated infections. Infections control is one of the definitive measures which should be taken in order to control these infections. There are a number of ways through which infection control measures are instituted and put in place. In terms of preventing these infections, it’s important to enhance infection prevention in the hospitals.
Conclusion
In order to address the issues of healthcare associated infections as one of the health and public health issues at hand, it is important to have monitoring being instituted in terms of the outcome as well as the correlation of the infections with both the hospital setting and health care professional’s commitment in infection prevention. These monitoring should be able to have a reflection of the processes taking place and which should be considered in preventing these infections. Therefore, having proper measures in place will help especially in the proper management of these infections in order to ensure that patient safety is enhanced and they are prevented from any form of infection which might come up while being managed for various ailments.
References
Center for Disease Control, (2014).Health Care Associated Infections
Hedrick, T. L., & Sawyer, R. G. (2005). Health-care-associated infections and prevention. Surgical Clinics of North America.
Horan, T. C., Andrus, M., & Dudeck, M. A. (2008). CDC/NHSN surveillance definition of health care-associated infection and criteria for specific types of infections in the acute care setting. American Journal of Infection Control, 36, 309–332.
Magill, S. S., Edwards, J. R., Bamberg, W., Beldavs, Z. G., Dumyati, G., Kainer, M. a, Fridkin, S. K. (2014). Multistate point-prevalence survey of health care-associated infections. The New England Journal of Medicine, 370, 1198–208.
Moro, M. L. (2006). Health care-associated infections. Surgical Infections, 7 Suppl 2, S21–S23.
