Healthcare Acquired Infections (HAIs)

Healthcare Acquired Infections Name Institutional Affiliation Healthcare Acquired Infections Healthcare Acquired Infections (HAIs), which can also be referred to as hospital-acquired infections or nosocomial infections, refer to infections that patients acquire in the process of getting treatment for either a medical or a surgical condition (ODPHP, 2019). Normally, during admission, the infection is not present. The modern medical practice uses different types of invasive procedures and devices such as ventilators and catheters in the treatment. These procedures and devices are the major causes of HAIs (Hensley & Monson, 2015). HAIs occur in various types of settings such as acute care hospitals, dialysis facilities, outpatient centers, ambulatory surgical centers, long-term care facilities, among others (Cullen & Thomas, 2018). However, surgical site infections, catheter-associated urinary tract infections, bloodstream infections, and pneumonia are the commonest HAIs. Though most HAIs are preventable, they are major causes of mortality and morbidity around the world. They also lead to increased costs of health care (Rahmqvist, Samuelsson, Bastami, & Rutberg, 2016). HAIs also include occupational infections affecting the staff. To address these challenges, there is a need to come up with strategies that focus on improving quality of care through minimizing the occurrence of HAIs. This paper seeks to look at the magnitude of HAIs, define the best practices in regard to the issue, and discuss strategies for improving the quality of care. The Magnitude of HAIs Despite the efforts to eliminate the challenge of HAIs, no country has completely solved the problem. According to the WHO, HAIs affects hundreds of millions of patients globally every year. The burden of the issue is greater in the low as well as middle-income countries. On a daily basis, HAIs result in a prolonged stay in hospitals increased resistance to antibiotics, long-term disabilities, additional health care costs, the financial burden to the patients as well as their families, and many unnecessary deaths. A study carried out in Greece revealed that the mortality risk of patients with HAIs was increased by 80%. Antimicrobial resistance also increased the risk of 90-day mortality by 90%-110% (Kritsotakis et al., 2017). However, the real global burden of HAIs remains unknown due to difficulties in gathering information. Moreover, most countries do not have adequate surveillance systems for HAIs in place. The countries that have the systems struggle with the complexity as well as lack of uniform criteria for diagnosing HAIs (World Health Organization, 2019). In the US, 1.7 million cases of HAIs are reported and lead to more than 90,000 deaths (Mauger, Marbella, Pines, Chopra, & Black, 2014). Australia lacks a surveillance system for HAIs. Therefore, assessing and determining the real burden of HAIs in the country is difficult. The effects of the initiatives adopted to enhance national infection prevention can also not be accurately assessed (Russo, Cheng, Richards, Graves, & Hall, 2015). A systematic review of peer-reviewed articles found out that approximately 83,096 HAIs occur every year. Of these cases, 71,186 were UTIs, 4902 were Clostridium difficile infections, an...