WHO hand hygiene strategy feasible and sustainable

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) strategy for improving hand hygiene is easy for health-care workers to practise, according to a new study published in Lancet Infectious Diseases. It observed that health care-associated infections were a major threat to patient safety worldwide and transmission in these settings was mainly from the hands of health-care workers. The report dubbed: “Global implementation of WHO’s multimodal strategy for improvement of hand hygiene: a quasi-experimental study,” was made available to the Ghana News Agency by Tarik Jasarevic of the WHO Communication Unit in Geneva. It noted that in six sites in Costa Rica, Italy, Mali, Pakistan and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the research team implemented WHO’s strategy in 55 departments in 43 hospitals. It said during the two-year period between December 2006 and December 2008, compliance with best practices increased from 51 per cent before the study to 67 per cent and infrastructure and staff knowledge were also...