Final Paper

Final Paper

Introduction

In the nursing and patient care profession, a majority of the life-threatening diseases affecting the health of people are contacted through the hands. On a daily basis, our hands come into contact with nearly everything in the environment around us and they become the perfect carriers of germ, disease and infection as a result. These hands then come in contact with other vulnerable parts of the body such as the eyes, mouth and nose. These parts are highly vulnerable as they have a very thin protective lining that disease can penetrate easily.

Hand washing provides the single-most effective solution to hand-contacted infections and diseases. It removes most of the bacteria and viruses from your hands and prevents their transference to your eyes, nose and mouth, where they may enter your body (Emslie & Hancock, 2008). It also prevents the spread of bacteria to your family and other people and places you come in contact with. Hand-washing is considered to be the foundation of prevention against germs and disease and it significantly decreases the likelihood of infection.

In the field of nursing and patient care in particular, one simply cannot lay enough emphasis on the importance of hand-washing. In the healthcare setting, hand-washing serves to eliminate or disinfect persons who have come in contact with pathogenic microorganisms. Hence, a task as simple as hand-washing can help to prevent 100,000 deaths every year. It is important to observe proper hand-washing procedures as doctors and nurses run the risk of carrying diseases from one patient to another.

In a medical setting, the proper procedure for washing hands involves thoroughly cleaning the hands with generous amounts of water and anti-bacterial soap (Savolainen-Kopra et al. 2012). Doctors and nurses must also take special care to make sure that they rub their hands with the digits interlocking. Moreover, dirt and debris that has gathered under fingernails must also be removed with the aid of a bristle brush. When this is done, the hands can be rinsed and dried using a disposable paper towel.

In order to encourage hygienic practices among doctors and nurses, it is imperative that a policy be introduced to make it compulsory for staff to thoroughly wash their hands in between attending to different patients. Also, in the case of doctors, this will mean that harmful diseases and infections will not be transmitted from one patient to another in between medical procedures and operations. Moreover, hand disinfectants and medicated soaps have proved as useful when a higher degree of disinfection is needed, such as in the case of surgery.

Discussion

Every day, we use our hands for multiple tasks and they come in contact with everything we lay them on around us present in our environment. This makes them eligible to be carriers for all types of bacteria, illnesses and infections. This increases the risk of spreading and transferring bacteria that kills over 100,000 people annually, just because of lack of correct hygiene procedures by health care providers which may be because health care workers do not have ...