GUILTY OR NOT?
Yesterday’s White Coat story has urged The Witch Doctor to digress a bit.
Imagine this:
A patient is in a bed with cot-sides.
A male doctor with a white coat, a wrist watch, and God forbid, a dangling tie wants to discuss some aspect of care with the patient.
He closes the screens around the bed and takes the cot-side down in order to bond a bit.
He does not wash his hands nor does he use an alcohol rub.
That doctor knows that the cot-side will be contaminated by the patient’s micro-organisms and those of members of staff, relatives and friends. When he takes down the cot-side his hands will become colonised with some of these organisms and he will transfer some of his own on to the cot-side.
A general mish-mash of bacteria.
The doctor will think this because he has never seen cot-sides being cleaned before each patient visit. Indeed he has never ever seen cot-sides being cleaned at all. Ever. That does not mean they are never cleaned. It just means they are not cleaned between visiting each patient. Are they?
No part of the doctor, his white coat or his dangling tie will come in contact with the patient on this occasion.
This is because the doctor ignored the protocol because his brain decided to use a no touch technique when talking to the patient.
Because of the risk of infection.
Onlookers did not know this. The patient in the next bed did not know this. The Modern Matron did not know this. The Infection Control Nurse did not know this. The ward Infection Control Champions did not know this. It is possible one or other of them may have used alcohol gel before they pulled down the cot-side.
But pulling down the cot-side after using alcohol gel will still result on a mishmash of organisms on the hands. An improvement maybe, but probably not significantly so, and associated with a false sense of security that a kind of protocol has been followed and therefore the hands are clean when they are not.
They only saw the doctor pulling the curtains for a patient consultation without washing his hands and then open the curtains and come out.
Ah. The curtains……………………………
What about the curtains wafting about!
That doctor did not wash his hands………
He gets no gold star.
Instead he has been awarded the Ace of Spades!
And the cumulation of lots of little acts of “neglect” such as this has lead to the notion that doctors in general do not wash their hands. They do not care about patients. They cause cross infection. They kill.
Hardly.
It is true that some doctors do not observe hand hygeine. Some doctors are perceived not to observe hand hygeine, but do. Some doctors do observe hand hygeine.
The Witch Doctor has a way of getting all doctors to wash their hands appropriately. It is difficult to believe no-one has thought about it before. If they have, its not being talked about.
The Witch Doctor wonders why.
It is simple. It doesn’t even need a magic spell!
The Witch Doctor - Link to a random page
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LINK TO UK MISSING KIDS WEBSITE
LINK TO MISSING PERSONS WEBSITE
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