Clean Nursing Environment

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Recommended: Literature review compliance hand hygiene

What we know today about maintaining a clean nursing environment can be traced back to its roots, over 150 years ago with Florence Nightingale. A lot of what Nightingale wrote about and practiced stemmed from providing a clean nursing environment. Air quality, water quality, noise, light, and nutrition were also her priorities, but cleanliness was the common factor. Over the years, cleanliness has now become infection control within the hospital setting and standards and guidelines have been made to ensure patient safety.
The following literature review will examine the standard of practice for maintaining a clean nursing environment, what can be concluded from the evidence, and what gaps need to be closed to further improve standards of care. …show more content…

APIC has also made guidelines that are evidence-based strategies for nurses on preventing and eliminating HAIs. Such guidelines have impacted nursing for the better, as evidence-based strategies have proven to decrease the number of HAIs nationwide.
Literature Review of the Evidence
The standard of practice for maintaining a clean nursing environment entails many aspects, but for the purposes of this literature review evidence pertaining to hand hygiene, prevention of health-acquired infections, and disinfecting healthcare environments will be discussed.
First and foremost, hand hygiene is a simple and effective solution to reduce both the spread of infection and multiresistant germs, and to protect patients from healthcare-acquired infection. The World Health Organization (WHO) developed guidelines on hand hygiene in healthcare with a global prospective to support hand hygiene promotion and improvement in healthcare facilities worldwide. Hand hygiene can be defined as handwashing, antiseptic handwash, antiseptic hand rub, or surgical hand antisepsis. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the rationale for hand hygiene are the potential risks of transmission of microorganisms to patients, healthcare worker colonization or infection caused by organisms acquired from the patient, morbidity, mortality, and costs associated with healthcare-acquired

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