Personal care, infection control and hand-washing
To prevent infection:
- Wash your hands before and after giving care.
- Use facility disinfectants for cleaning.
- Keep clean items together and dirty items together.
- Practice appropriate isolation procedures.
- Use universal precautions!
Universal precautions are ways of making sure that every person who has direct contact with body fluids will be protected in case the fluid are infectious or carry a disease. Almost no one thinks of 'protecting themselves' from a baby. Universal precautions are especially important to prevent the transmission of blood-borne and other infectious diseases, such as the kind your baby may be exposed to if he or she spends a lot of time in the hospital.
Examples of the universal precautions that have been adopted by the federal government include:
- Wash hands and other skin surfaces immediately after contamination. If your child has been ill, be sure you wash your hands after changing diapers, cleaning up spit up food or touching other bodily fluids.
- Do not give care without wearing gloves if you have open cuts or oozing sores on your hands, this is to protect both you and your child.
- Clean up blood or body fluid spills promptly.
- Handle linen carefully. This includes wet or soiled sheets, towels, clothe diapers, baby blankets and anything else that might
- Bag contaminated articles carefully.
- Be sure waste is put in a leak-proof, airtight container. This includes baby wipes, disposable diapers.
Universal precautions are equally important to everyone. If universal precautions are consistently used, the spread of inf
Providing personal care, feeding children with disabilities