Dangers of Germ Exposure in Hospital

Germs are everywhere. We can’t see them, but they’re in the air, and they are on every item and surface we touch. Many are relatively harmless, but some can cause serious illness, especially in hospitalized patients. What are the points at which the patients are at risk of infection in healthcare facilities? What are the status of water, sanitation, and hygiene in healthcare facilities and what can healthcare providers and patients do to minimize the risk of infection? Let's read all about the dangers of germ exposure in hospitals in this article.

High Risk Places

Some of the highest-risk places are intensive locations like an operating theatre but even in other locations, patients can pick up an infection especially if healthcare workers are moving back and forth from higher-risk settings to lower-risk ones. They can transport bacteria and viruses on their hands. That’s why one of the most important measures for infection prevention and control is for healthcare workers to practice proper hand hygiene. This just means regularly cleaning their hands wherever they are interacting with patients.

Water, Soap and Alcohol

Now to do this they need to have access to plenty of water and soap and also alcohol rubs can be very useful because they are quicker and easier for staff to use. It is important to protect patients, their caregivers and visitor, and healthcare workers because doctors, nurses, and the other staff in healthcare facilities are very vulnerable to getting infections through all the contact they have with sick people.

Shocking Findings

A repost jointly published by WHO in UNICEF covers water, sanitation, and hygiene as well as waste management and environmental cleaning services in healthcare facilities throughout the world. For most people, the most shocking finding in the report was that only half of the healthcare facilities worldwide had basic hygiene services. This just means having hand washing facilities where patients receive care as well as in bathrooms. So, besides health care worker cleaning their hands regularly, it is also important for patients and visitors to be able to wash their hands when they use the bathroom. That’s not possible in the bathroom of about half of the healthcare facilities in the world today.

Least Developed Countries

As you might expect, the situation is even worse in the least developed countries where only a third of healthcare facilities and basic hygiene services are. There was some better news in the water report. It was found that 78% of healthcare facilities had a water supply available on premises but those data don't tell us if that water is clean and safe or if there is enough of it to meet all the needs in the healthcare setting in all the different locations within the Health Center. It was also found that two out of five hospitals globally didn't have basic essential waste management services and that just means safe segregation, treatment, and disposal of infectious waste as well as sharp materials like used needles. We know that when there is inadequate water, sanitation, and hand hygiene poor waste management and infection prevention and control, which can lead to antimicrobial resistance where the standard medicines that are used to treat infections become ineffective. This is a profoundly serious public health risk.

What We Must Do

The first thing is to make sure that people take advantage of hand hygiene facilities where they are available. This is something healthcare workers can and should do every day it's part of their job but it's also important for the patient and their caregivers. There is something that is called the multimodal strategy which supports cleaning hands using the right techniques at the right times and this is a time-proven approach to improving hand hygiene.

Conclusion

If the health care center does not have water or soap or alcohol drops for cleaning hands, then you can complain. It's not that expensive for hospitals and even smaller facilities to make sure that hand washing materials are available wherever patients receive care and also at toilets. Also, healthcare administrators do have a lot of power over what happens in their facilities. So healthcare managers can make sure that the resources that they do have are used effectively for improving water and sanitation add infection prevention and control. They can also advocate for having more resources where there are gaps.