Formulating a Clinical Question on Hospital Acquired Infection

Running head: HEALTH CARE
Health care
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Author’s note

1HEALTH CARE
Introduction:
For any research project, the development and formulation of a clear and researchable
clinical question is necessary to effective analyze research problem and ensure that all variables
and population of interest are identified. The PICOT (Population, intervention, control and
outcomes) is a widely known format for the development of a research question. The main
purpose of this paper is to formulate a clinical question based on identification of a relevant
clinical problem. The discussion regarding clinical problem will justify the need for developing
such questions and evaluate the clinical relevance of such questions in the context of nursing
practice. The paper will also give suggestions regarding future research in the area.
Potential clinical problem:
The main clinical problem chosen for this research is the prevalence of hospital acquired
infection or nosocomial infection in hospital settings. It is a nosocomially acquired infection that
occurs because of transmission of infections in hospitals during activities like recapping needles,
giving injections and handling infected blood of patient. The risk of such infection is dependent
on various factors such as presence of various pathogens in the hospital setting, infection control
practices and immune status of patients. The risk of such infection also increases because of long
hospital stays, invasive producures, indwelling catheters and frequent visits to the health care
facilities (Monegro & Regunath, 2017). Current research evidence shows that hospital acquired
infection is a major challenges for low and middle income countries with limited health care
resources and it is a major cause behind morbidity and mortality (Shrestha, Rai & Gaihre, 2018).
Khan, Baig and Mehboob (2017) argues that as shortening the period of hospital stay has no

2HEALTH CARE
impact on the incidence of nosocomial infection, evaluating the infection control practices in
hospital setting is most important to reduce the rate of such infections.
Although there are many infection control practices to prevent hospital acquired
infection, hand hygiene is considered the most important and basic practice to control the risk of
transmission of infection from one person to other during clinical procedures. However, a major
problem that is seen among nurse and other staffs in hospital setting is that the adherence or
compliance to hand hygiene is very low. The study by Mostafazadeh-Bora, Bahrami and
Hosseini (2018) used observational method to analyze nurse’s compliance to ‘five moments for
hand hygiene’ approach and found that hand hygiene compliance rate was only 12.80%. The rate
of compliance was not high for all moments of hand hygiene. Another study indicated variable
outcomes related to adherence to hand hygiene practices and isolation measures. The study
revealed gaps in strategies for infection control in ICU setting (Musu et al., 2017). These
evidences indicate the need to find out the cause behind low compliance to hand hygiene and
clarify the benefits of hand hygiene compliance in reducing the burden of nosocomial infection.
As hand hygiene and nosocomial infection are highly linked to each other, investigating
about the contribution of hand hygiene in minimizing rate of such infection is critical. This is
critical particularly for nurses as they are the main providers of physical care and their
compliance with hand hygiene is extremely necessary (Fox et al., 2015). Hence, based on review
of many evidences, it can be concluded that burden of such infection and poor compliance to
hand hygiene is an area that needs to be improved in future. Future research work in the areas of
investigating the cause behind poor hand hygiene compliance among nurses and ways to clarify
the benefits of hand hygiene for patient is necessary. This would help in the development of