Hygiene and Cleanliness in MIOT Hospitals

CHENNAI, India - Sept. 25, 2014 - PRLog -- Your friend is in hospital. She has had surgery and has been brought back to her room. Friends and relatives are concerned and come to visit. You are anxious and feel you just have to see your friend. A loved one brings in food, specially prepared for the patient. Yet another comes in clutching a bouquet of flowers...

Post-surgery, immunity is low and your friend would be susceptible to infection. On the other hand, coming from outside, you are carrying potential infection via dust and germs, but have a stronger resistance and can be immune to it.

Understanding Hygiene

In a recent article, ‘MIOT Answers the Ebola Scare’, (../12363210-miot-hospital-answers-ebola-scare.html) Dr Prithvi Mohandas, Joint Managing Director of MIOT International, explained that - prevention being better than cure - strict hygiene has to be maintained in order to prevent infection and sickness. When you pause to think about it, none of this is rocket science. We all know that hygiene is important. But, more often than not, we are more concerned with the visible, more obvious aspects of hygiene.

Hygiene is more than cleanliness. It refers to practices associated with ensuring good health and healthy living. In a hospital situation, hygiene is an imperative and something the patient has to be assured of.

In India, we have a very high rate of infection - sometimes as much as 10 times more than in western countries. Infections in hospitals are of two types; one is endogenous infection, which is self-infection or auto-infection; this is latent in the patient at the time of admission, and develops later due to lowered resistance. The other is exogenous infection, picked up at the hospital, after the operation / treatment, as a result of cross-contamination, followed by cross-infection.

A question commonly asked is,”If the surgery was a success, why is the patient still sick?” Sickness in these cases is due to post-surgical infections. The solution is not dosing the patient with antibiotics, but proactively following infection-control systems within the hospital.

At MIOT Hospitals

Our first line of defence against infection is prevention. We have a protocol in place which we follow strictly as part of a comprehensive and systematic approach to infection control and hospital hygiene.

MIOT Hospital (http://www.miothospitals.com/) leads antimicrobial resistance from the ground up. Even as MIOT was under construction, much thought and planning went into the design of the hospital to facilitate infection-control.

Here are just a few examples.

1.       We have separate corridors for hospital in-patients and surgery patients. The purpose of this is prevent patients heading in to surgery from picking up germs and viruses from the rest of the patients.

2.   MIOT follows a firm policy of visitor control. Not more than one visitor per patient is allowed. Yes, this has angered/irritated/annoyed some. But, in the end, they understand that this is the only way we can minimise infection in our hospitals.

3.  We have invested in the latest technology for cleaning, sterilising and disinfecting in order to control and prevent infection. We use a sterilisation unit from Sweden which sterilises surgical instruments and hydraulically lifts them into the theatre to avoid contamination by hand.

5.  Laminar Air Flow systems have been installed in all our operation theatres to control air-flow and direct it away from surgical sites.

6.  MIOT is a pioneer in key-hole and minimally-invasive surgery in which smaller openings expose lesser area for infection to set in.

7. At MIOT, we do not believe in cutting corners. We have invested heavily in best-in-class technology to create 58,000 square feet of the most modern theatre complex, housing 10 bacteria-free theatres.

8. Our surgeons look like spacemen in their protective gear. We use the Charnley suit, designed for orthopaedic surgery, to keep infection at bay.

As a result of our strict adherence to policies that maintain and promote hygiene, MIOT can take pride in the fact that the risk of infection in any area of treatment while at MIOT is 0.02%

Now, knowing all this, don’t you agree that hygiene is all-important? And that hospital rules do makes sense?