Personal hygiene is one of the most important aspects of a healthy lifestyle that the individual can control. Good personal hygiene not only aids in maintaining a healthy body and mind, boosts self-esteem, and improves social interactions.
In clinical settings, maintaining good hygiene practices is even more critical as it helps to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Having top hygiene practices also helps protect the health of patients, healthcare workers, and visitors. In addition to personal hygiene, specific measures are necessary in clinical settings to reduce the risk of infection transmission.
In this article, we will discuss some of the best hygiene practices that healthcare professionals can implement to promote a clean and safe clinical environment.
Top Hygiene Practices for Clinical Settings
Hand Hygiene
Proper hand hygiene reduces the number of potentially infectious bacteria by an order of magnitude. Cleaning one’s hands before and after contact with a patient or other healthcare provider is often regarded as the most effective way to prevent the spread of disease. Washing your hands with a hand wash like bactol wash and alcohol-based hand massages are two common methods of maintaining clean hands.
When engaging in surgical procedures, it is necessary to scrub one’s hands thoroughly before donning sterile nitrile gloves. Use an alcohol-based hand rub or wash your hands with water and plain or antimicrobial soap designed for use in healthcare environments for routine dental checkups and nonsurgical treatments. In most clinical settings, an alcohol-based hand massage is preferred over soap and water unless the hands are filthy.
Use of Personal Protective Equipment
Workers can be protected from chemical, biological, and physical threats by wearing or using personal protective equipment (PPE). This measure safeguards workers when the dangers cannot be adequately reduced through engineering and administrative controls.
Personal protection equipment can include gloves, safety glasses and shoes, earplugs or muffs, hard helmets, respirators, coveralls, vests, and complete body suits.
All PPE should be well-made and well-maintained to ensure its safety for the user at all times. Workers should feel at ease while wearing it. The difference between being protected from harm and exposure to it depends on how well the PPE fits the wearer. If you want some gloves for clinical purposes, nitrile gloves Australia covers you.
Respiratory Hygiene/Cough Etiquette
People should practise good respiratory hygiene and cough etiquette to avoid spreading respiratory illnesses like the flu and the common cold. When a virus-infected person coughs or sneezes, it can spread to other people, causing a respiratory infection. A sick person’s cough or sneeze can spread germs several feet away, infecting everyone who comes into contact with the droplets.
Hand-to-hand contact might facilitate the rapid spread of viruses. Droplets can also survive for brief periods of time on a number of environmental objects, such as bed rails, door knobs, wheelchairs, or patient care equipment, and can be transferred from one person to another by casual contact.
Sterile Instruments & Devices
Multiple procedures involving specialised machinery are needed for instrument processing. Every dental office must have a plan for dealing with potential blood- or fluid-contaminated tools and supplies during shipping, storage, and use.
It is important to have easy access to the manufacturer’s reprocessing instructions for all reusable dental instruments and equipment. Most medical gadgets designed for one-time use only do not include reprocessing instructions from the manufacturer. Only utilise disposable medical equipment on a single patient before throwing it away.
Clean and Disinfected Environmental Surfaces
As part of the plan to avoid the spread of infection, it is important to establish standards and processes for the regular cleaning and disinfection of common areas.
Cleaning should always come before disinfecting since it removes more germs. Disinfection is a non-lethal microbial inactivation procedure that eliminates almost all known pathogenic bacteria.
Surface disinfection and environmental cleaning are important in preventing the spread of germs that might cause diseases in patients receiving medical care. The environmental reservoir includes surfaces that are easily contaminated with various harmful diseases.
Waste Management
The term “waste management” is used to describe the numerous methods available for dealing with trash. The wastes can be disposed of, destroyed, processed, recycled, reused, or managed. The main goal of waste management is to lessen the quantity of trash so that potential dangers to people and the environment can be avoided.
The goal of waste management is to lessen trash’s negative impact on ecosystems and people. Municipal solid waste, produced in institutional, commercial, and residential settings, accounts for a significant portion of the total garbage managed.
Wrapping Up
We are all carriers of unknown pathogens. Therefore, treating all bodily fluids and substances as though they could spread disease is prudent. The minimum degree of infection prevention and control expected in the workplace can be attained by following standard procedures. Standard precautions are taken to lessen, and ideally eliminate, the possibility of spreading disease, especially that of blood-borne viruses.
