Journal Reaction Paper

Original Article

I chose this article about “Knowledge and Practices of Nurses in Infection Prevention and
Control within a Tertiary Care Hospital” because it is really an important part of a nurse’s job to
prevent infection while taking care of the patients, just like what my clinical instructor said,
“Nurses should help patients heal, not to do harm to them”. Prevention of infection is very
important because when you are caring for your patient you should be very careful and be aware
all of the time on what you are doing because one small mistake in every procedure and you might
introduce bacteria to the patient’s IV site, folly catheter, etc. What I have learned in this article is
that hand washing should be thought as a very important step in every procedure, many student or
nurses doesn’t really think of how big or how important hand washing is. While reading this I also
thought of those procedures that has steps wherein you need to alcoholize or disinfect the things
wherein you insert your syringe like giving IV push medications, I sometimes forgot to bring those
alcohol pads or sometimes I just really forgot to wipe or disinfect before giving IV push
medications but luckily I always have a classmate who goes with me when I give IV meds and
they always remind me to disinfect the Y-port before injecting the IV medication and after reading
this article I learned that even that simple step can cause or harm my patient just because of being
careless sometimes. I see some of nurses or student who sometimes do procedures without washing
their hands and I am sometimes one of them . Some might just wash their hands like once or twice
in an hour but I learned in this article that in every procedure in it very important to wash our hands
before and after the procedure. I also googled hand washing and found on www.who.int that there
are 5 moments for hand hygiene, 1.before touching a patient, 2. Before clean/aseptic procedures,
3. After body fluid exposure/risk, 4. After touching a patient, and 5. After touching patient
surroundings. After reading all of these I have learned when to do hand hygiene and how important
hand hygiene is but my concern is that washing hands most of the time with antibacterial soap or
alcohol can make your hands dry and might irritate it, especially when you are working on
hospitals like AMC or AMSGH wherein most of the time only 2 nurses are present in every ward
meaning those two nurses have a lot of patient, if they have a lot of patient then there will be a lot
of procedures to be done so there will also be a lot of hand washing to be done and I also asked
some nurses why they don’t really do hand washing that very often is that because they say
antibacterial soap or alcohol makes their hands dry and sometimes their hands get irritated, I hope
there will soon be antibacterial soap or alcohol that won’t make your hands dry but for me that
reason is not valid. In conclusion this article is really important for all nurses and students to read
for and it helps us to be reminded of how important hand washing is.