Today’s topic is very much important as well as neglected too and its most important reason is that we do not get money by doing this thing. So neither we learn about this nor teach about this. Not only you do the negligence in infection control but also I do. This topic became important to me when I was treating a Hepatitis B patient and patient didn’t tell me beforehand neither I asked. I remembered it very nicely when I came to know about this I got panicked and after that I forget it too quickly because I thought it will not happen to me and I was wrong about that. But next question was I did what I had to do, now should I continue the treatment or not and if yes then what should I keep in mind?
At that time I understood that infection control is not only important for providing successful treatment but also to protect yourself and your staff and the risk of ignoring it can be huge.
There can be many ways for Proper Injection Prevention and Proper Injection Control and these methods change time to time. Now the question comes that which method is the best and how the proper implement could be done?
So the answer is CDC which means Center For Disease Control. Whole world follow the guidelines of CDC. Infection control is not given much attention in India nor anyone take the action and this is the only reason 95% of clinics do not follow it.
In India if you want to know about infection control then you will have to study about NABH standards. NABH gives you the guidelines that how the work is to be done.
You can own any of the method infection control in your clinic but your program must have things like this.
A well designed infection control program should be there in your clinic which will save you as well as patients or visitors.
Your policy of infection control should be written which should be updated regularly. For ex – if a new staff comes to your clinic and if he doesn’t know about autoclave and if that is written there then he could refer to that.
You should have a system to provide proper training and education in the clinic.
Surveillance program should also be there in your clinic which can check that the proper implementation is there or not and could take the necessary action.
You have to make sure that proper resources should be there for implementing these. For ex – you will have to check that mask is available or not for the respiratory hygiene or hand sanitizer is there or not. Do you have PPE (Personal Protection Equipment, e.g. eye protector) in proper amount or not?
Multimodal strategy should be there in your clinic. There are different infection control policies for waiting area, doctor chair, table, laptop and operating area.
At last, all these things will make sense only when all these things are recorded, audit, and monitored and if changes are needed that could also be done.