International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences
ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 2 Number 10 (2013) pp. 441-447
Accessories of health care workers: a boon or a curse to patients in pediatric ICU and Nursery?
J.Lavanya1* , Manoj Jais1 , Virendra Kumar2 and Renu Dutta
1Department of Microbiology, Lady Hardinge Medical College, New Delhi, India 2Department of Pediatrics, Lady Hardinge Medical College & Kalawati Hospital, New Delhi, India
ABSTRACT
Hundreds of millions of patients are affected by health care-associated infections worldwide each year, leading to significant mortality and financial losses for health systems, especially in pediatric intensive care unit and nursery. Health care workers play an important role in cross transmission of infection as they provide essential services to patients. Hands of health care workers have long been known to be the potential source of infection. But the accessories like stethoscopes, mobile phones and pens used by the health care workers for the betterment of the patients have now become a major threat to critically ill patients in pediatric ICU and nursery. As they are constantly in contact with hands of health care workers and in the vicinity of patients, contamination of these accessories with multi drug resistant organisms is inevitable. Thus the present review article is designed to throw light on these highly neglected accessories which is turning out to be a curse to patients and also methods to control them has been described.
Keywords
Health care associated infection; Accessories; Health care workers; ICU