Not again!!! I hate the winter vomiting but with a passion. This is the fourth year in a row that I have been unlucky enough to catch the Norovirus. My immunity must be improving because I have never felt as bad as I did the first time I got struck down by this curse of the healthcare profession.
Norovirus: The Winter Vomiting Bug
I will never forget the first time I got sick with the Winter Vomiting bug. It broke out on my ward and we had a few patients vomiting. It was only a few days later that I caught it myself. I was not prepared for the full effects of it. Vomiting is bad, but vomiting both ends just seemed unfair. What followed was essentially three days of being stuck on my toilet at home with a bowl in my hands. Of course it spread to the rest of my family as well, despite making sure I slept seperately, cleaned down everything I touched with disinfectant and generally did all I could to make sure they escaped unscathed.
I had to wait three more days before being allowed to return to work. I needed them. It took all three of them for me to physically recover.
Oh well, I thought, at least I should be immune to it now. How ill informed I was! The Winter vomiting bug is not the measles. The next year I was back on my toilet with plenty of reading material. Immunity to the Winter Vomiting Bug only lasts about three months.
So what can be done to stop the spread of the Norovirus? Not a lot. From a hospital viewpoint visitors must be stopped. Most people have no idea that they are still infectious after the symptoms have cleared for several days. Even if you know that, you are also infectious before exhibiting symptoms. There is no way you would know.
If you have come into contact with the Winter Vomiting bug then you need to stay away from hospitals or indeed as many places where there are other people as is possible.
Hospital staff must rigidly observe hygiene practices. This unfortunately is an area that Irish hospitals struggle with at the best of times. Surfaces that can be/have been touched should be regularly wiped down with a chlorohexadrine solution like Hibiscrub, or another suitable product depending on the surface. Patient traffic within the hospital should also be cut to a minimum. Porters should be assigned to specific parts of the hospital only. In general foot traffic needs to be minimised in order to stop the spread of infection. The Winter Vomiting Bug is horribly infectious.
There is another area that is overlooked by most hospitals in my experience when it comes to the Norovirus. Agency Staff. Agency staff could be working in an infected ward one night and then a clear ward in a different hospital the next. Nursing Agency staff get paid for the hours they do. It is therefore more tempting to go back to work as soon as the symptoms have cleared. I know it happens. Nurses claim that they had some other non-gastro illness in order to be able to work and earn again as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately an increase in staff sick leave due to the Winter Vomiting Bug leads to an increase in the need for agency staff to cover them.
Irish Hospitals should try to book the same agency staff for larger blocks to reduce the risks. It is not the agency staffs fault if they are posted to different hospitals on different days. It is usually down to bad management on both the parts of the hospital and the agency. A good CNM will manage to organise that the same agency staff work on a ward over a period of time. This makes sense on several levels because the agency staff then become familiar with the workings of that particular ward and therefore more useful too.
Unfortunately there is a growing trend towards centralising the ordering of agency staff. While this has it’s merits from the aspect of cost control and simplifying the job of the agency it usually results in the random posting of agency staff around a hospital with little to no continuity.
Having just recovered from my fourth bout of the Winter Vomiting bug I have had enough. To those that are already critically weak and hospitalised it is potentially extremely dangerous. To staff it is massivly disruptive. A harder line needs to be taken on visiting. You can’t stop people coming to visit a dying relative, but somebody with a broken leg can do without visitors for a little while!
Nursing
Agency Nurses, Chlorohexadrine, Curse of the Healthcare Profession, disinfectant, Hibiscrub, Hospital Hygiene, Hospital ward, Immunity to Norovirus, Immunity to Winter Vomiting Bug, Infection control for Norovirus, Norovirus, Stuck on the toilet, Vomiting, Winter Vomiting Bug
