JEDDAH, 14 May 2004 — The Kingdom’s first course on infection control in hospitals will be held here tomorrow with lectures and workshops on infection control within hospitals and patient follow-up after hospitalization.
The course was planned and organized by Nabeela Al-Abdullah, the infection control specialist at King Abdul Aziz hospital in Jeddah, and was fully booked shortly after its announcement to the medical community with applications from across the Kingdom.
Al-Abdullah, a graduate nurse from King Abdul Aziz University and trained at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London, told Arab News there was no coherent infection control program in the Kingdom. “There are seminars and conferences,” she said, “but no course specifically designed to train physicians, nurses, microbiologists and other health-workers.” The course is for education and to raise awareness with the authorities of a need to set up a comprehensive training program for health professionals. Currently, infection control is left to the management of individual hospitals. “Part of our problem is following up patients after they have left hospital,” said Al-Abdullah.
An effective control program benefits the patient and saves money. “The fewer problems with the transmission of infection within a hospital, the less time patients spend there. This reduces cost for the hospital, and allows the patient a swifter recovery and shorter time away from work or family.” The problem with cross infection is present in any busy hospital and not confined to the Kingdom or Middle East. The SARS outbreaks in Asia caught hospital workers there off guard. The standard or lax infection control procedures were not enough to contain this particularly virulent virus, which killed hundreds of people.
In the UK, a nursing magazine recently reported that pressure on hospital beds is preventing nurses and domestic staff from cleaning beds and equipment thoroughly to prevent cross-infection. It said that nurses at an infection-control conference claimed that the government’s waiting-time targets in accident and emergency, coupled with high bed-occupancy rates, mean that there is little time for hospital staff to clean beds between patients.
It is not only cross-infection between patients or staff and patients that causes problems and generates costs. A study in the US reported that requiring gowns to be worn in ICU by staff and visitors may add more than $70,000 per year to the budget, but in return saved over $400,000 in costs associated with potential spread of the bacteria.
