Modes Of Transmission And Control Measures For Communicable Diseases Are Discussed In The Essay.

Please carefully read through each question posed.  In your response, please use terms and phrases you defined in your previous assessment.  Reflect on your learning unit and your own research.  Please aim to present 180 words for each response to fully demonstrate your knowledge in this area of study.  A minimum of 150 words for each response is required.

Describe 5 common infection risks for your workplace (or a workplace you aspire to work in) and detail the control measures.

People working within health care will come from a variety of backgrounds, with varying skills and abilities. When communicating infection control procedure to staff members what are the literacy considerations you would need to make?

Modes of Transmission of Communicable Diseases

Communicable diseases are referred as diseases which can spread from one infected person to other. The infectious agents involved are bacteria and viruses. These pathogens integrate in to the body, multiplies to grow in number and release toxins that causes harm to the body cell function, and sometimes leads to death of the person. The transmission of communicable disease is the method of transfer of the infection from one to another (Ismail et al., 2016). There are various modes of transmission of pathogen such as airborne, direct contact, or indirect contact like droplets. the following are the modes of transmission of communicable disease:

• Droplet transmission from infected persons sneezing, spitting or coughing.
• Food or water borne transmission due to ingestion of food or water contaminated with pathogens or using unclean utensils.
• Direct contact transmission by touching and indirect contact transmission by sharing things with the infected person such s towel, clothes etc.
• Airborne transmission through respiratory tract because of their presence in the air.
• Vector transmission via insects as some infectious agents breed inside their body.
• Body fluid transmission due to usage of used or contaminated needles, unprotected intercourse (Worby, Lipsitch and Hanage 2017)

The five common infectious risks are:

1. Common cold (Rhinoviruses/Coronavirus): It can easily spread from an infected person to other in a workplace by physical contact or through air via sneezing or coughing.
2. Pneumonia (Streptococcus pneumoniae): effects the lungs. Symptoms are coughing, mucus production, breathing problem, fever or chest pain. It spreads via contaminated air, coughing, sneezing and if not maintain proper hygiene.
3. Tuberculosis (Mycobacterium tuberculosis):effects the respiratory tract, mainly lungs. Symptoms are coughing up blood and mucus, fever, weight loss and night sweat.
4. Measles (Rubeola virus): it is spread through contaminated air from one person to the other, and from sneezing or coughing of an infected person and it shows symptoms like fever, rashes, body pain and also includes respiratory tract involvement.
5. Acute infectious conjunctivitis: it is an inflammation of the conjunctiva of the eye. It is caused by bacteria, virus, fungi or parasites. Symptoms are itching of eyes, discharge of mucus, swollen lymph nodes and sometimes blurring of vision (Zivich, Gancz and Aiello 2018).

Control measure:

The measures to control the spread of these diseases are as follows:

• by inspiring hand washing with soap or alcohol based sanitizer.
• employees must cover their face while sneezing or coughing.
• sick leave policies can be proposed for people suffering
• encourage vaccination for the diseases.
• Place the person with infections in separate room.
• Disposal of contaminated surplus safely
• Avoid using used items
• Avoid open wounds
• Use washed or sterilized things such as utensils, towels etc.
• Proper education about the disease and safety measures among the staffs (Lewinsohn et al., 2017).

While communicating the infection control procedure to the healthcare staffs who belong to different background, the literacy consideration should be followed:

• Teaching English language to avoid the communication gap and it will help them to understand the condition and he infection control process in a better way.
• Focusing on their knowledge about the disease and its control practice. As they belong to various backgrounds they might not have much knowledge about the disease and its cause and control. So they need to be provided with proper knowledge for better outcome (Batterham et al., 2016).
• Skills of these staffs will vary as they have been practicing in different fields, their skills and abilities should be considered as it might happen that these skills come out to be helpful for the control and prevention of the disease.
• It is important to teach them about various technologies and strategies that are used to address a patient or a condition of infectious disease as they may not have proper idea about it (Batterham et al., 2016).

Steps that needed to be taught while training staffs in infection control:

• Proper knowledge about the disease causing pathogen and their routes of transmission and infection.
• Hygiene maintenance; how and when to use alcohol base sanitizer, soap and water and the time duration.
• Use of personal protective equipment(PPE)
• Proper application of regular and transmission based provisions.
• Sustain a hygienic, safe setting as well as precise practices and use of chemicals while daily and terminal cleaning.
• Vaccinating the staffs
• Practice of using
• strategies and medication in order to control the infection.
• Providing proper documentation and reporting the details of the disease to the department of health (Markovic and Brusaferro 2017).

• Physical examination:infected person’s physical appearance and disease symptoms can be used to monitor the infection control. It can be used to see the progress of the patient and the result of the treatment procedure that is provided. The symptoms of the diseases will be observed and if the treatment is provided in proper manner, it will be reflected in the physical examination.
• Injection:vaccinations are used in cases of infectious diseases to bring it in control or lower the effect of the toxin. They can be provided to the infected person and also administered to others in order to avoid further infection.
• Blood sampling: the blood sample from the infected person can be extracted and observed in order to study the virus and the toxin released. And it can also be used to check the progress of the medication and the vaccination. The blood sampling will help to monitor the progress of the treatment as the toxin level will be found to be decreasing in the blood (Stoové 2018).

The hierarchy of control is as follows:

• Elimination and substitution: it is the most effective of all the measures and it is found to be very difficult to implement in a present procedure. It is used to remove the infection and its risk totally from the workplace. The elimination process uses telemedicine for initial screening process to keep the infected patient away from the workplace (Dosman et al., 2015).
• Engineering controls: preferred over PPE and administrative control measures for the worker in the workplace to avoid exposure. They are used to remove the infection before it effects the workers, such as airborne infection isolation chamber, vacuum shrouds.
• Administrative controls and PPE: the administrative control and PPE are frequently used with the carried out process when the disease is not in control properly. These procedures help the worker to protect themselves from the infection and has been seen that they are less effective when compared to other measures. These measures involve, sick employee policy, proper hand hygiene etc. (Dosman et al., 2015).

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) Code of Ethics focuses on maintaining a patient’s confidentiality. According to AMA, a client’s infection related information should not be shared with everyone, except the family members and the healthcare facilities (Sanggaran, Haire and Zion 2016). The implication of confidentiality is important because:

• Patients are concerned about the humiliation and discrimination that takes place after others witness about the infection and related condition, such as in cases of HIV patients.
• They want the knowledge about who has the access to their medical information.
• It is important, as it promotes comfortable situation for a patient, so that he can share his personal information and details to the healthcare facilities.
• An infection control system with a better privacy mechanism will stimulate public sureness and trust (Sanggaran, Haire and Zion 2016).

It is important to maintain proper procedures and management to avoid infection transmission in workplace. The pathogens spread from an infected person to other with the help or air and other means such as physical contact or sharing personal things such as utensils, towels etc. As workplace is an enclosed area, where number of people work together, interacting in close immediacy with each other, the risk of the spread of infectious disease increases. So it is important to control the spread as it would harm a large number of people and also the production and efficiency of the work. From a single infected person, the pathogen can be spread to the entire population in the workplace and it may result to a disease outbreak and effect huge population. To avoid such scenario, the proper measures to avoid the infection spread should be followed and if require provide leave to the infected person (Hansen, Zimmerman and Mortel 2017).

Reference:

Batterham, R.W., Hawkins, M., Collins, P.A., Buchbinder, R. and Osborne, R.H., 2016. Health literacy: applying current concepts to improve health services and reduce health inequalities. Public health, 132, pp.3-12.

Callander, D., Moreira, C., El-Hayek, C., Asselin, J., van Gemert, C., Smith, L.W., Nguyen, L., Dimech, W., Boyle, D.I., Donovan, B. and Stoové, M., 2018. Monitoring the Control of Sexually Transmissible Infections and Blood-Borne Viruses: Protocol for the Australian Collaboration for Coordinated Enhanced Sentinel Surveillance (ACCESS). JMIR research protocols, 7(11).

Dosman, J., Hagel, L., King, N., Koehncke, N., Kirychuk, S., Trask, C., Neudorf, J., Day, L., Voaklander, D., Pickett, W. and Saskatchewan Farm Injury Cohort Study Team, 2015. The hierarchy of control in the epidemic of farm injury. Journal of agromedicine, 20(3), pp.360-369.

Hansen, S., Zimmerman, P.A. and van de Mortel, T.F., 2017. Assessing workplace infectious illness management in Australian workplaces. Infection, Disease & Health, 22(1), pp.12-20.

Ismail, S.A., Abbara, A., Collin, S.M., Orcutt, M., Coutts, A.P., Maziak, W., Sahloul, Z., Dar, O., Corrah, T. and Fouad, F.M., 2016. Communicable disease surveillance and control in the context of conflict and mass displacement in Syria. International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 47, pp.15-22.

Lewinsohn, D.M., Leonard, M.K., LoBue, P.A., Cohn, D.L., Daley, C.L., Desmond, E., Keane, J., Lewinsohn, D.A., Loeffler, A.M., Mazurek, G.H. and O’Brien, R.J., 2017. Official American Thoracic Society/Infectious Diseases Society of America/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention clinical practice guidelines: diagnosis of tuberculosis in adults and children. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 64(2), pp.e1-e33.

Markovic-Denic, L. and Brusaferro, S., 2017. Infection control capacity building in European countries with limited resources: issues and priorities. Journal of Hospital Infection, 30, p.1e4.

Sanggaran, J.P., Haire, B. and Zion, D., 2016. The health care consequences of Australian immigration policies. PLoS medicine, 13(2), p.e1001960.

Worby, C.J., Lipsitch, M. and Hanage, W.P., 2017. Shared genomic variants: identification of transmission routes using pathogen deep-sequence data. American journal of epidemiology, 186(10), pp.1209-1216.

Zivich, P.N., Gancz, A.S. and Aiello, A.E., 2018. Effect of hand hygiene on infectious diseases in the office workplace: A systematic review. American journal of infection control, 46(4), pp.448-455.