APIC, ASHES offer tips for patients
Quality managers and other professionals seeking to deal with potential disease outbreaks know that patient education and cooperation are critical elements in keeping things under control and ensuring optimal patient and staff safety. The Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) and the American Society for Healthcare Environmental Services (ASHES) have come up with a list of tips for ensuring a clean, healthy environment in a health care facility that you may wish to share with your patients:
• Hand hygiene is job one: Clean your hands — and request that others do the same
Germs reside on many surfaces in the hospital — including bed rails, stethoscopes, faucets, and even the TV remote control. You and your health care workers can pick up these germs on hands. So it is important to keep hands away from your tubes, wounds, and face, and wash or sanitize your hands frequently. Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue or your sleeve. Watch the staff to make sure they wash or sanitize their hands with waterless sanitizer before providing care — and remind them if they forget. Ask for waterless hand sanitizer near your bedside.
• Survey your room — does it look clean?
Just like home, your hospital room should look and smell clean. Rooms should be cleaned daily. The areas of the patient room most at risk for harboring and spreading infection are those frequently touched by you and by health care workers. These are called "high-touch surfaces" and include bed rails, bedside tables, IV poles, call bells, door handles, bathroom surfaces, and computer keyboards. Environmental services (ES) staff should put on a new pair of gloves when they enter your room, and focus on comprehensive cleaning of the high-touch surfaces. Observe the cleaning process to ensure the high-touch areas are being cleaned. Don't be shy — if you believe they have missed something, say something! ES technicians might leave a card to let you know if they cleaned while you were away. If you have questions, call or ask nursing to call. Alerting the environmental staff of a concern will help to ensure a clean, healthy environment.
• Don't contribute to the clutter.
Limit personal items and reduce clutter to ease the critical job of cleaning hospital rooms. Keep personal items off the floor and away from waste containers. Ask for a trash basket near your bed and have visitors dispose of their trash promptly — including pizza boxes and take-out food containers.
• Clean your over-the-bed tray
Your over-the-bed table should be cleaned/disinfected at least once a day. This should be done by your environmental services staff, but can be repeated just before you eat by the person delivering your meal tray.
• Never use a dirty pillow
Notify a staff member if your pillow falls on the floor or becomes soiled.
• Obverve visitor etiquette.
To keep your environment as clean as possible, visitors should not sit on your bed or handle your equipment. Ask visitors to sanitize their hands when entering and leaving your room to avoid bringing in and carrying out germs. Guests should not visit if they are sick or have had any symptoms within the last three days including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fever (or feeling feverish), uncontrolled cough or rash.
• Take your slippers off.
To prevent germs on the floor from contaminating your bed, remove your slippers, socks or footies before putting your feet on or in your bed.
• A word about patient bathrooms.
Patient bathrooms are just for patients. Visitors should use common bathrooms in the lobby or hallways.
• Meet your infection preventionist and your environmental services technician
Patients often see many health care workers, but they don't usually see those who work behind the scenes to ensure the prevention of health care-associated infections. All hospitals have an infection preventionist — a qualified nurse or other professional who manages the hospital's infection prevention program, as well as a team of environmental services technicians. To learn more about infection prevention, ask to see the infection preventionist.
Additional information is available at www.preventinfection.org and www.ashes.org.
Quality managers and other professionals seeking to deal with potential disease outbreaks know that patient education and cooperation are critical elements in keeping things under control and ensuring optimal patient and staff safety.You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
- Award-winning Medical Content
- Latest Advances & Development in Medicine
- Unbiased Content