Originally Posted by earle58
this article enrages me because the majority of nosocomial infections are preventable. and there's just so little accountability from the hospitals. it truly sickens me.
if need be, mandatory inservices need to be done as often as needed, until all workers (yes, including the md's) are brainwashed with 'wash your hands wash your hands..."
as for the part about housekeeping, well that's going to be an ongoing battle as long as nurses are expected to do a notable part of housecleaning.
there are too many solutions to this epidemic with too little cooperation. unconscionable.
leslie
I think we would do ourselves well to brainwash the visitors first. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to get onto a family member for coming out of a patient's room
still wearing the isolation gown and gloves to ask a staff member about something (this was in adult ICU, the nurses were easier to find than the call lights). They would sometimes bring something from inside the room out, touch the counters and the station, lean up against things - with isolation garb on!! I would explain why this was not to be done and send them back in the room. It's not like there aren't signs on the doors explaining all this in detail, but I never assume that people can or will read them.
Some of them would get indignant, some would play dumb, some would demand to see the supervisor, some actually just complied. One supervisor actually had the nerve to threaten to write me up for "poor customer service". I told her to go right ahead. Meanwhile, I would be on the phone with infection control detailing how she was allowing a resistant organism to be spread through the ICU just because it was being done by "customers". She just looked at me, so I reminded her that these people were touching common areas after coming out of a contaminated room, (and who knows what they touched while in there - yet the gown and gloves make it obvious that they didn't was their hands). These same places are where we put charts and other various paperwork, and just about every staff member who enters our area would touch a surface that this "contaminated" visitor touched and the organism would be spread all over the hospital. These microorganisms cannot be seen, so if I had not caught them, no one would know that the surfaces needed to be disinfected.
Well she was dumbfounded - like it never occurred to her that visitors could spread germs too. OTOH, I think she was just dumb...
There are probably others out there like her, though.
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