WHO Promotes the Evidence for Clean Hands
Each year, hundreds of millions of patients around the world are affected by healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). Although HAI is the most frequent adverse event in healthcare, its true global burden remains unknown because of the difficulty in gathering reliable data. Understanding and assessing the global burden of HAI is one of the key areas of work of the Clean Care is Safer Care program. Systematic reviews of the literature have been conducted to identify published studies from both developed and developing countries and highlight the magnitude of the HAI problem. The results of these reviews were published online December 2010 in The Lancet, and are compiled in a comprehensive WHO report on the burden of endemic healthcare-associated infection worldwide.
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Most healthcare-associated infections are preventable through good hand hygiene cleaning hands at the right times and in the right way. The WHO Guidelines on hand hygiene in healthcare support hand hygiene promotion and improvement in healthcare facilities worldwide and are complemented by the WHO Multimodal hand hygiene improvement strategy, the Guide to implementation, and implementation toolkit, which contain many ready-to-use practical tools. These tools have been field-tested and have yielded new, interesting data on hand hygiene practices and success factors for improvement.
To access these tools, CLICK HERE.
Source: WHO
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