Quality Improvement Proposal for Infection Control

Title
Your Name
Subject and Section
Professor’s name
Date
Hospital-Acquired Infections
Overview
Infection control is one of the pressing issues in the hospital setting because it leads to hospital-acquired infections (HAIs), bringing danger to both patients and employees. HAIs place a financial burden and increased mortality and morbidity on all the stakeholders. To reduce the incidence of HAIs, it is essential to have an excellent grasp of quality improvement and control (Monegro et al., 2020).
HAIs can be present or can develop at the time of admission. Usually, the incubation period is up to 48 hours before the manifestation of the symptoms. The prevalence and transmission of the infections are assessed by many government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN). Some of the HAIs include catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI), central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI), and ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) (Monegro et al., 2020).
The CDC conducted research that evaluates HAIs in 183 United States Hospitals. This examined 11,282 patients in total. The results show that 4% of admitted patients incur at least one HAI. Consequently, a study in 2011 shows that around 648,000 admitted patients incurred 721,800 infections. The majority of the diseases are pneumonia and surgical site infections, which account for 21.8% of the overall numbers, respectively. This is followed by the following: gastrointestinal, UTIs, and primary bloodstream infections, accounting for 17.1%, 12.9%, and 9.9%, respectively (Monegro et al., 2020).
 Importance of Quality Improvement and Expected Outcome
The quality improvement allows for better sterilization and disinfection of the hospital environment, invasive devices, and hospital equipment used to diagnose and treat patients. Through a thorough application of such health practices, a decrease in the incidence of HAIs is expected. Many guidelines have been released to decrease the rate of HAIs, and the poor compliance of hospitals has been proven to elevate the risk of transmission of nosocomial infections. The CDC released reports on the significant outbreaks caused by the lack of quality control in a hospital. The primary stakeholders responsible for this are the nurses, who are the ones responsible for disinfecting some of the medical equipment and the majority of the invasive medical devices. Despite the various guidelines, a large gap between the guidelines and the actual implementation has been observed over the years. Surveillance is necessary to have a systematic approach in the data gathering and analysis to provide the information vital to quality control planning, implementation, and evaluation (Khan et al., 2015).
Previous Research
One study investigated the intensive care unit (ICU) environment, the healthcare workers' handwashing techniques, and the surface environment in hospitals in Tehran, Iran. The researchers obtained 762 and 605 swab samples from the healthcare providers’ hands and six ICUs. To recognize the type of bacteria present, biochemical methods were done along with the antimicrobial susceptibility testing. All the assessm...