HAND WASHING

Hand Washing

Hand Washing

Introduction

Hand washing is a significant skill which is very important while handling any products or any patient. In hospitals, it is very necessary as certain diseases are very communicable and could be prevented with this small technique. It might seem odd at first that hand washing is treated as such an important skill, but in fact, it is one of the most important in all of nursing and soon you will become an old hand at it. In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweiss became the first doctor to give specific orders to all students to scrub their hands in chlorinated lime believing that disinfection of hands could break the transmission of disease from cadaver to pregnant women. Florence Nightingales' triumphs in the Crimea have been well documented. She convincingly showed that safe food, water and a clean environment could result in a major decrease in death rates in a military hospital. Her interest in hospital hygiene never waned and throughout her long career she proved to be a very able lobbyist(Ehrenkrantz 2009).

Analysis of evidence related to topic of interest

Nosocomial infection is a frequent problem affecting hospitalized patients, increasing hospitalization time and mortality. The importance of hands in the transmission of hospital infections is worldwide accepted. However, it is difficult to include hand washing (HW) as routine behavior in health-care workers since microorganisms are invisible or there are no adequate elements to carry out this practice(Stone 2008). Health-workers hands by themselves, or after contact with patients, increase the risk of virus and bacteria transmission that are sometimes resistant to antimicrobial agents (AMA). This is a two-way hazard that could be noxious to both patients and health-care workers, and which depends on the nature and frequency of contact with infectious materials, inoculum and prevalence of susceptible patients. Pre-registration nursing courses now have practical hand washing tests where washing techniques are tested using dye on the hands. Indeed, nursing journals have long since realised the importance of good hand hygiene as a major factor in preventing the spread of illness in the care environment. However, next time you have the misfortune to be an inpatient in hospital, observe the ward round - it will be very unlikely that the Consultant or Junior Doctors observe such a vital practice(Smith-Temple Johnson 2007).

The hands of those who provide health care to patients palpate, percuss, perform procedures, comfort parents and hold children, among many other activities. These procedures provide ideal chances for microorganisms to travel between the caregiver and the patient. Among these microbes are all those nosocomial pathogens both gram negative and gram positive pathogens which are responsible for hospital acquired infections Seventeen percent of the staff of an intensive care ward were found to have Klebsiella spp(Plowman et al 2009). contaminating their hands, and these strains could be related to the serotypes infecting or colonizing patients in the ward on the same day. Some simple ward procedures were identified that resulted in contamination of nurses' hands with 100 to 1000 Klebsiella per hand. The Klebsiella survived on artificially inoculated hands for up to 150 minutes. Hand washing with chlorhexidine hand cleanser reliably gave 98 to 100% ...