Title: Prevention of Healthcare Asssociated Infections (HAI) As Promoted At Two Target Public, Funded Hospitals of the Philippines and A review of Incidental HAI, risk to Dental Practitioners & Patients
Abstract:
For the past several decades, hospitalized patients have been known to risk developing infections unrelated to their presenting chief complaints or symptoms. The World Health Organization (WHO) identify those happenings as Healthcare Associated Infections (HAI); and, they are ominously regarded to be the most frequent adverse incident in healthcare, worldwide.
These occurrences arise from the invasion and multiplication of harmfully opportunistic micro-?organisms such as bacteria, viruses, and parasites that are not normally present within the body at the time of hospitalization. Their propagation may be enabled by the patient’s own health status or by a maze of factors that may be attributable to mal-?conditions of the facility itself, to the prevailing behavioral culture of in-?house healthcare providers, employee staff, and, even those of the visitors. When HAI develop, the additional intrusion to a patient’s presenting disease compounds the diagnostic and therapeutic interventions; it increases the risk in morbidity and, in alarming frequency, may lead to death. Notably, this shared environment may also prevail to invade patients receiving care and, by cross-?contamination, the staffs at other healthcare settings such as free-?standing facilities for ambulatory care or out-?patient care that include dental offices and their complex of providers. Encouragingly, at a 2005 WHO First Global Patient Safety Challenge conference, studies reported a rise in success rates at restraining HAI in developed countries. However, the same uplifting HAI-? containing view is not yet shared by low-? to middle-?income countries. Interestingly, while review of contemporary dental literature conjures an increasing awareness of HAI-?risks by the dental profession, the practitioners, the staff and their patients may yet benefit from added studies on the factual risks from cross-? contamination of invasive micro-?organisms in a dental setting and adoption of a universally-?standardized policy and protocol on containing HAI-?risks.
