ON June 25, the Department of Health will be promoting the National Patient Safety Day to raise awareness on the risks of infections originating from confinements in Philippine hospitals.
Australian public health researchers Reema Harrison, Adrienne Cohen and Merrilyn Walton of the University of Sydney published a report in the International Journal for Quality in Health Care 2015 issue, noting that the hospital-originated infections were common in the Philippines and other developing countries in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia and Vietnam.
Hospital-associated infections are being considered as major public health threats around the world because of five known consequences:
First, hospital-associated infections can cause disability and death to patients in hospitals. These infections make hospital admissions ironic. Patients seek the help of the medical sources of the hospitals to cure their ailments only to be infected within its walls with microorganisms that are often incurable with antibiotics.
Second, hospital-associated infections can complicate medical interventions and even interfere with the expected effects of antimicrobial treatments. Hospital staff with poor hand-washing practices can transmit infectious microorganisms from one patient to another, confounding physicians on the emergent diseases even after treating the presenting symptoms or diseases that had brought patients into the hospital in the first place.
Third, hospital-associated infections can, and in fact, promote antibiotic resistance, as already mentioned in the first two known consequences.
Fourth, hospital-associated infections can increase the patient’s hospital length of stay. When a patient gets sick with a new disease while being hospitalized, the only medical advice is for the patient to stay longer in the hospital for further treatment.
Fifth, hospital-associated infections can compromise invasive medical instruments, such as laparoscopes, and render instruments unclean and infectious.
There is one concern that patients will have to raise: Will Philippine hospitals take responsibility for their patient safety blunders? Will it not resort to cover-ups or technical issues that render the truth difficult to prove by the patients even when knowing that such blunders occur?
There is the so-called “ethical code of practice” for health care professions in the Philippines and around the world. Oftentimes, though, there is an issue of expediency when the threat to professional practice becomes real. Will the health care professions and institutions in our country live up to the rule of honesty in practice or resort to the rule of proof? That question is for our health care providers to answer.