Evaluating Infection Control Practices Against Influenza

Infection control is pivotal for maintaining health standards in facilities dealing with infectious diseases like influenza. This analysis highlights the importance of strict compliance with established policies to safeguard both patients and staff. While breaches are often unintentional, implementing robust prevention strategies can significantly mitigate these occurrences. The essay reviews various scholarly sources discussing infection practices, emphasizing Australian guidelines and global perspectives on infection control. It underscores the necessity for continuous improvement in policy execution and awareness among healthcare professionals to effectively manage influenza risks.

Running head: INFECTION CONTROL ASSIGNMENT
Infection Control Assignment
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

Table of Contents
Introduction: 2
Risk event: 2
Example of breach: 3
Strategies for preventing policy breach: 3
Dissemination of information: 5
Conclusion: 5

Introduction:
Infection is one of the largest public health concerns and a vast majority of men, women and
children die every year due to infection outbreaks. Infection control can be defined as the process
of prevention of the nosocomial or health care associated infection, however it is often an under-
recognized and under- supported sectors of health care. One of the most common and abundantly
occurring infections in the health care sector is influenza, which is mainly a community based
infection, and mostly 200 thousand people worldwide are reported to be admitted in hospitals
every year due to influenza infection or other related complication (Chenoweth et al., 2015). This
disease is primarily transmitted via large particle respiratory droplet transmission, that is, by the
infected person coughing or sneezing near susceptible individual, contaminating him or her as
well. Hence it can be considered as a highly significant risk and the infection control policy of
NSW can be implemented in the scenario of Influenza. This assignment will attempt to explore
infection control in the context of influenza, taking the aid of NSW infection control policy.
Risk event:
Influenza or flu occurs to a vast majority of Australian citizen and 3500 deaths occur in am
annual basis in Australia due to influenza outbreaks. There is no restriction associated with the
susceptibility of influenza, anyone can get infected by this disease, although the gae groups that
have been standardized to be at more risk to influenza include, individuals aged more than 65
years, children of 6 months to 5 years of age, especially aboriginal children and pregnant woman.
The infection control policy needs to be extremely cautiously implemented in order to prevent
the infection outbreak. However, in the health care environments, infection control policy
breaches can be very common. Policy breaches are a major public health concern and it costs the

health and safety of the patients, and also the credibility of the health care staff of the facility
(Weinshel et al., 2015).
Example of breach:
An infection control policy can be breached by a multitude of different reasons, for instance
it can be breached if the health care staff does not comply to hand hygiene policy, the infection
control policy will be breached and other patients can get hospital acquired infections easily. As
discussed above in the assignment, the transmission medium for influenza virus is by the means
of respiratory particles, hence every time a patient coughs or sneezes the contamination particles
are released everywhere and can come into contact with the skin of the health care staff easily.
And if the care provider had been caring for the patient without the personal protection
equipments in place and fails to adhere to 5 minutes of hand hygiene diligently post handling the
patient and caring for another patient, the infection control policy will be breached and the order
patient will be at extremely high risk of acquiring influenza infection (Health.nsw.gov.au., 2017).
Strategies for preventing policy breach:
Infection control policies are designed in order to enhance the safety and wellbeing of the
patient in the health care facility and also ensure that they are not in any kind of risk to hospital
acquired infection. However, it also needs to be considered that, with so many detailed and
intricate steps to an infection control policy, it is very common for a breach to happen, and in
most cases it is not even intentional. However, a few strategies can be devised in order to prevent
such breaches from occurring and preserving the compliance and integrity of the infection
control policy.

 First and foremost, in order to prevent a breach it is crucial for that breach to be
evaluated and analysed, hence the very first step to this strategy will be to evaluate
the policy breach (Hall et al., 2015).
 The very next step to this strategy should be gathering all the subjective and objective
data regarding the infection control policy breach so that the underlying reason
behind the breach can be identified.
 After the contributing factors to the infection control policy breach is identified, the
next step should be the qualitative assessment of those factors. for instance, if the lack
of compliance to the policy is due to excessive workload for the nursing
professionals, the strategy will be completely different than if the reason is due to
shortage of hand sanitation equipments.
 Followed by the qualitative assessment of the reason for the breach, that particular
issue needs to be addressed in acute detail (Gould et al., 2015).
 Apart from that, regular discussion session with the health care professional can help
the authority uncover the issues and grievances in the health care staff.
 Periodic infection control policy training and sill improvement can be extremely
beneficial for the staff to understand the value of infection control and how it can
improve their own health and safety along with ensuring the safety of the patent they
care for, inevitably increasing the compliance.
 Lastly, care should be taken to ensure to monitor the activities of the health care stff
to ensure they are complying with the policies and are not participating in breach due
to incompetence (Dowd et al., 2013).

Dissemination of information:
Any policy breach demands legal actions, whether it is occurring in a health care
environment or not. In case of healthcare environments, breach of a policy is to be not9fed to
the higher authority on highest priority, although there are strict regulations and protocols to
the dissemination of policy breach information (Cox et al., 2014). In case of any policy
breach the responsible key stakeholders, like the infection control practitioners and hospital
epidemiologists, representatives of facility risk-management teams, affected State and local
health departments, associated care providers needs to be informed verbally and in written
from the supervisor at the earliest. However, any data from the infection control policy
breach situation is not disclosed to anyone other than the key stakeholders mentioned and
disclosing any information is considered privacy and confidentiality breach for the facility
concerned (Chenoweth et al., 2015).
Conclusion:
On a concluding note, it can be stated that infection control policies are not just aimed at
safeguarding the health and safety of the patients residing in the facility but also at
safeguarding the best interests of the staff working in the facility. And influenza virus being
an extremely and potentially high infectious pathogen, absolute compliance to the policies is
extremely important. Although policy breaches are rarely intentional and sound policy breach
prevention strategy can be extremely helpful in preventing breaches exponentially.

References:
Chenoweth, C.E., Hines, S.C., Hall, K.K., Saran, R., Kalbfleisch, J.D., Spencer, T., Frank,
K.M., Carlson, D., Deane, J., Roys, E. and Scholz, N., 2015. Variation in infection
prevention practices in dialysis facilities: Results from the national opportunity to improve
infection control in ESRD (End-Stage Renal Disease) project. infection control & hospital
epidemiology, 36(7), pp.802-806.
Cox, J.L., Donna Simpson, M., Letts, W. and Cavanagh, H.M., 2014. Putting it into practice:
Infection control professionals’ perspectives on early career nursing graduates’ microbiology
and infection control knowledge and practice. Contemporary nurse, 49(1), pp.83-92.
Dowd, K., Taylor, M., Toribio, J.A.L., Hooker, C. and Dhand, N.K., 2013. Zoonotic disease
risk perceptions and infection control practices of Australian veterinarians: call for change in
work culture. Preventive veterinary medicine, 111(1), pp.17-24.
Gould, C.V., Umscheid, C.A., Agarwal, R.K., Kuntz, G. and Pegues, D.A., 2015. The
Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC)(2009) Guideline for
prevention of catheter-associated urinary tract infections. Center for Disease Control, pp.1-
87.
Hall, L., Halton, K., Macbeth, D., Gardner, A. and Mitchell, B., 2015. Roles, responsibilities
and scope of practice: describing the ‘state of play’for infection control professionals in
Australia and New Zealand. Healthcare infection, 20(1), pp.29-35.
Health.nsw.gov.au. (2017). Influenza. [online] Available at:
http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/Influenza/Pages/default.aspx [Accessed 19 Sep.
2017].

Umscheid, C.A., Agarwal, R.K. and Brennan, P.J., 2015. for the Healthcare Infection Control
Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC). Updating the Guideline Methodology of the
Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC).
Weinshel, K., Dramowski, A., Hajdu, Á., Jacob, S., Khanal, B., Zoltán, M., Mougkou, K.,
Phukan, C., Staneloni, M.I. and Singh, N., 2015. Gap analysis of infection control practices
in low-and middle-income countries. infection control & hospital epidemiology, 36(10),
pp.1208-1214.