Effect of Poor Hand Hygiene Practice by Health Care Providers on Hospital Acquired Infections - Essay Example

"Effect of Poor Hand Hygiene Practice by Health Care Providers on Hospital Acquired Infections" is a marvelous example of a paper on infections.
Risk reduction which is also known as optimization can be defined as an approach taken to achieve the best results in the most effective way under specific conditions. The principles of risk reduction can be used in the same scenario as the principles of optimization. This is because in optimization, the strongest points are utilized to maximum and the undesired qualities are minimized. Generally, risk reduction has been associated with disregard to cost so long as the desired outcomes are impressive. However, risk reduction has been known to be limited if there is a lack of sufficient information. Therefore, a lack of sufficient information is an impediment to risk reduction.

Example of risk reduction

A perfect example of risk reduction is lung cancer and smoking habits. Lung cancer is associated with regular smoking. A person who smokes regularly can therefore be said to have high chances of developing lung cancer. Smoking is therefore a high risk of getting cancer and by stopping or reducing smoking, a person can be said to be reducing the chances of suffering from lung cancer.

Concepts of the theory (risk reduction)

 Lung cancer is likely to develop in one out of ten people who are non-smokers. This is an absolute risk. However, four out of ten people who are smokers have the likelihood of developing lung cancer and therefore this can be said to be a relative risk. Risk reduction depends on the protective factors. Protective factors assist in cutting down or providing counteractive measures of risk factors. Risk factors are the things that are normally associated with the risks but are not necessarily the cause of the risk. An example of linking up the association between the risk factors and protective factors can be well showed in analyzing crime. The risk factors associated with crime include drug use and drug abuse, poverty, poor family upbringing, academic failure among others. The protective factors to these risk factors are therefore training of skills, economic empowerment, fighting drug abuse, and having stable families to provide mentorship and role models.

A healthcare-associated infection (HAI) can be defined as an infection that is acquired in the course of undertaking medical intervention in an acute-care environment as cited by Motacki, Kapoian, and O'Mara (2011). By applying risk reduction in tackling healthcare-associated infections, the risk factors have to be identified to improve effectiveness. Hand hygiene has been named as the most common risk factor for healthcare-associated infections. In order to reduce the risk of contracting healthcare-associated infections through unhygienic hands, a protective measure has to be taken so as to ensure that hand hygiene is upheld.

The use of hand hygiene to reduce infection

By upholding hand hygiene, microbes such as Candida, adenovirus, Pseudomonas, and hepatitis A virus among others can be stopped from infecting other patients through hand hygiene lapses especially through wounds and other paths. Some effective ways of ensuring that hand hygiene standards are maintained include hand washing in running water, use of handwashing antiseptic and sanitizers, using warm towels, electrically sterilizing hands, and use of surgical gloves. All these measures should be done before and after attending to a patient.