While the healthcare professionals take an oath to do no harm, seeking healthcare can come with its harm. Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are infections that patients acquire in the process of receiving treatment. These infections are known to appear from 48hours or more after admission and until thirty days after receiving healthcare (Haque, 2018). The most common among these infections are surgical site infections, pneumonia, urinary tract infections and gastrointestinal infections (Haque, 2018). While most patients’ reasons for hospital visits is to seek health, the harm that could be encountered in the process can be fatal for some patients. The American Center for Disease Control indicates that about 1.7 million patients acquire health-care associated infections while another 98,000 lose their lives annually for the same reasons (Haque, 2018). These infections have become a safety concern for patient and healthcare workers given that they increase morbidity, mortality, hospital stays and costs. In USA, about $28 to $45 billion is spent annually treating these infections.
While HAIs cause a significant burden in different healthcare systems, several reports indicate that prevention of these infections involve use of simple and straightforward methods. Some of these methods include regular hand-washing with soap and running water and use of alcohol-based hand-rubs to sanitize hands. Most of the advocacy done around this issue has been centered on health-care workers with organizations such as the WHO encouraging healthcare workers to observe strict sanitation measures before touching patients. These interventions have left out the individuals at the center of all this: the patient. There are few or no advocacy efforts that involve patients in the prevention of HAIs. This led us to formulating the PICOT question: Do patients empowered on methods of preventing HAIs develop better attitudes in preventing HAIs compared to patients without knowledge of HAIs prevention during hospital stays? The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of patient involvement in the prevention of HAIs.
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My type of foreground question for this research would be a prognosis question. This is because the research aims at comparing the different outcomes of two groups of patient: those who are aware of HAIs and those not aware of HAIs. The studies will aim at deciding whether patients taught the procedures of prevention of HAIs saw a significant change in attitude towards leading healthcare teams in reducing HAIs. Based on the type of question stated above, our research will look for evidence from cohort studies. Cohort studies examine how events differ between two groups of individuals. It examines the outcome between people exposed to the suspect prevention strategy versus people not exposed to the prevention strategy. The most appropriate evidence would be from prospective cohort studies as opposed to retrospective cohort studies since the prospective studies provide an opportunity for researchers to follow patients through the period of research, indicating better outcomes. An appropriate cohort study for this research would be a study that divides participants into those who were empowered on strategies of preventing HAIs and those who were not empowered on the same.
Our search strategy was based on the PICOT question formulated above. Using the question, we assembled the terms that would be vital in our search such as patients, healthcare-associated infections and knowledge of prevention of HAIs. For this particular search, we did not involve use of synonyms as our aim was to first use the exact words we were looking for. Once we had the terms to use in our search, we selected the websites that we thought would provide accurate and peer-reviewed information for our study. We started with PubMed, CareSearch and Google Scholar. We then went ahead to search these terms in this website and filtered through the results provided in our search.
Our search yielded many articles with most articles emphasizing on the role of healthcare workers in reducing HAIs. We started with eliminating those that focused on healthcare workers. To achieve this, we added patient’s role to our search within the sites, which provided a narrower scope of research. Our search strategy involved narrowing down to those that were published from 2015 which met our requirement of articles published within the last 5 years. Another search strategy we used was to select articles based on their relevance to the study. It is important to note that there are limited articles on our topic hence it was important to first select any article that was relevant. We then subjected the selected articles to a quality test based on the credibility of their authors and whether they were published in journals. This search yielded two articles which we thought met out criteria, while considering the limited sources that would answer our question.
The first article we selected was “Empowering patients in the hospital as a new approach to reducing the burden of health care-associated infections: The attitudes of hospital health care workers.” This is a qualitative study that sought to find out the knowledge of healthcare workers of the need for patient participation in prevention of HAIs (Seale et al, 2016). This article was selected based on the credibility of the writer, relevance and the time of publishing. While it may not directly focus on patients, it demonstrates the attitude of patients towards prevention of HAIs and their expectations. The second article is “Ask, speak up, and be proactive: Empowering patient infection control to prevent health care-acquired infections.”This article is a cohort study that recruited patients in a surgical unit, dividing them into two groups with one group empowered on prevention of HAIs and the other not empowered(Seale et al, 2015).The results showed the willingness for patients to take the lead in prevention of HAIs. This study is relevant to our topic, and looks at the outcome of two groups as planned in our study design. It is written by a credible author and meets the criteria for our time limit.
References
Haque, M., Sartelli, M., McKimm, J., & Bakar, M. A. (2018). Health care-associated infections–an overview. Infection and drug resistance , 11 , 2321.
Seale, H., Chughtai, A. A., Kaur, R., Phillipson, L., Novytska, Y., & Travaglia, J. (2016). Empowering patients in the hospital as a new approach to reducing the burden of health care–associated infections: The attitudes of hospital health care workers. American journal of infection control , 44 (3), 263-268.
Seale H, Chughtai AA, Kaur R, Crowe P, Philipson L, Novytska Y, Travaglia J.(2015) . Ask, speak up, and be proactive: empowering patient infection control to prevent health care–acquired infections . Am J Infect Control , 43 :447–53
