Hospital associated infections adversely affect both the patient and the nurse by threatening their lives. Preventing these infections is, therefore, important because of several reasons.
One of the benefits of preventing health-associated infections to patients is the reduction in healthcare costs. Studies have found that these infections affect many patients across the world (Jia et al., 2019). The different hospital-associated infections prolong hospital stay for nearly 10 days (Jia et al., 2019), which both increases suffering among patients and burdens hospital resources besides leading to high healthcare costs. Additionally, the infections adversely affect hospitals because prolonging hospital stays decreases the number of admitted patients, which decreases the medical income of the organizations.
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Besides, patients infected with illnesses that resist available drugs threaten other patients in hospitals because the illnesses can spread across the entire hospital and even outside (Jia et al., 2019). Considering challenges of anti-microbial resistance, adequately preventing hospital-associated infections using sufficient protocols improves patient safety. The reason for this is that the established protocols for preventing the infections also assist in preventing potential outbreaks of drug-resistant infections, which benefits all the patients in society.
Preventing hospital-associated infections also benefits nurses by releasing them for other tasks. The reason for this is that nurse must invest their time to deal with these infections as patients stay longer in hospitals (Arefian et al., 2016). Given the issue of nurse shortages in numerous hospitals, prevention of the infections allows the few nurses to focus on other patients or tasks, which eliminates the need to hire more nurses and generates cost savings. Nurses also benefit because they are the ones who offer care to patients directly at bedsides in addition to being the largest group of hospital staff (Arefian et al., 2016). Preventing these infections protects the nursing staff from acquiring them and transmitting to other staff.
References
Arefian, H., Vogel, M., Kwetkat, A., & Hartmann, M. (2016). Economic Evaluation of Interventions for Prevention of Hospital Acquired Infections: A Systematic Review. PLOS ONE , 11 (1), e0146381. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146381
Jia, H., Li, L., Li, W., Hou, T., Ma, H., Yang, Y., Wu, A., Liu, Y., Wen, J., Yang, H., Luo, X., Xing, Y., Zhang, W., Wu, Y., Ding, L., Liu, W., Lin, L., Li, Y., & Chen, M. (2019). Impact of Healthcare-Associated Infections on Length of Stay: A Study in 68 Hospitals ` in China. BioMed Research International , 2019 , 1–7. ` https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/2590563
