Hospitals focus on infection

Hospitals focus on infection

HCM CITY (VNS) — All health facilities in HCM City should monitor and assess infection control systems in order to prevent hospital infection, according to the City Department of Health’s Medical Profession Division.

At the workshop on improving patient safety for nurses, which was held in HCM City yesterday, Huynh Thi Phuong, said that all health facilities in the city had established an infection control system.

However, only 68.5 per cent of them monitor and assesses the system regularly, according to Phuong.

Monitoring and assessment helps find shortcomings in the infection control systems so that hospitals can improve the systems.

Every hospital in the city has set up an infection control council.

The city also has begun programmes on hand washing compliance, and safe solid and liquid waste treatment.

Lots of the research shows that hospital infection raises mortality, prolongs the duration of illness and treatment, which increases the use of antibiotics and hospital costs.

Phuong used a 900-bed hospital and its intensive care unit in Brussels, as an example of the effectiveness of proper infection control.

The hospital started its infection control programme in 1996. It assessed the basic rate of nosocomial infection in the programme’s first year, she said.

It adopted methods such as the standardisation of nursing care and hand hygiene.

The results were a reduction in the number of patients with sepsis-blood poisoning, urinary tract infections, and nosocomial pneumonia by 33 per cent over five years, Phuong said.

Phuong said that improving care techniques would help improve patient safety.

Jackie Wright, president of Australia Viet Nam Volunteers Resource Group Inc’s Vic Health Education Team, said that hospital safety was a serious global public health issue.

In recent years, countries had increasingly recognised the importance of improving patient safety. In developed countries, one in 10 patients is harmed while receiving hospital care, she said.

Health facilities should improve patient safety by promoting a culture of reporting and learning from patient safety incidents, she suggested.

Collecting data from incidents would assist in identifying trends and patterns of avoidable incidents and underlying cause, as well as developing models of good practice, she added. — VNS

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