How to ensure your healthcare workers are practicing standard precautions correctly
Standard precautions are practices healthcare workers should follow to prevent the spread of diseases and infections.
These steps involve washing hands, wearing gowns and gloves, and sterilizing medical instruments between uses on different patients, among other actions.
Healthcare workers must practice standard precautions correctly in order to ensure the safety of patients in their care.
Here are some ways you can keep your healthcare workers practicing standard precautions correctly, so that you can keep your patients as safe as possible from contamination and disease spread.
What are Standard Precautions?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) established basic rules in 1977 that have since been modified to protect patients from most common causes of infections.
Known as Standard Precautions, these guidelines include hand washing, disinfecting instruments, wearing gowns and gloves when needed, and disposing of medical waste appropriately.
By following Standard Precautions as well as working in an up-to-date facility healthcare workers can decrease their chances of passing along or picking up harmful germs and viruses.
Ways to Adopt Standard Precautions
There are several steps that a hospital, clinic or doctor’s office can take to ensure its staff is practicing proper Standard Precautions. Here’s a breakdown of how each one works.
Setting up an Environment for Standard Precautions
Standard precautions, or Standard Infection Control (SIC), is a set of infection control procedures developed by CDC.
A practice should follow SIC guidelines when evaluating and treating patients. This includes Treatment efficacy, or the systematic and scientific assessment of a treatment’s effectiveness, makes up the first dimension.
Clinical utility, or the applicability, viability, and usefulness of the intervention in the local or particular situation where it is to be delivered, is the second dimension.
Behavioral Recommendations for Adopting Standard Precautions
As mentioned earlier, adherence is considered crucial for preventing spread of infectious agents.
Therefore, a number of recommendations have been suggested in order to make sure that healthcare workers apply Standard Precautions consistently and effectively.
As suggested by Noskin et al., as part of their behavioural model for safe health care practices, it is important for nurses and other healthcare professionals to adopt a positive attitude toward Standard Precautions.
This is covered in How to ensure your healthcare workers are practicing standard precautions correctly
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