WHO has reeased new guidelines on hand hygiene.
Download from: https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/guidelines-on-hand-hygiene-in-co...
OVERVIEW
These Guidelines are concerned with the practice of hand hygiene to protect community health outcomes, in particular, the reduction of diarrhoeal diseases and acute respiratory infections.
The focus is on hand hygiene in non-health care settings, collectively referred to as community settings. Community settings are defined as those where health care is not routinely delivered. They include three broad domains: domestic (households), public and institutional settings.
The recommendations are relevant and implementable in any resource context. They are particularly relevant to long-term development contexts, complementing existing recommendations on hand hygiene in acute humanitarian response settings available through the Sphere standards for promotion of water, sanitation and hygiene. The Guidelines are intended for use in a routine health system context to improve population health, and also during health emergencies, as part of broader response strategies.
EXTRACTS:
'Effective communication of vital information on hand hygiene is a necessary precondition. If people do not know why, when or how to practise hand hygiene, they may not prioritize it, may miss key times, or may use materials or techniques that do not sufficiently remove pathogens from hands.'
'The recommendations are as follows:
1. Governments should implement policy, legal, regulatory and fiscal measures to promote hand hygiene as a critical public health intervention. These actions should aim to remove barriers to the practice of hand hygiene and strengthen the factors that enable behaviour change and/or sustain practice. (strong recommendation, moderate certainty evidence)
2. To be effective, hand hygiene in community settings should be practised with plain soap and water for enough time to enable covering both hands entirely with soap and thoroughly rubbing at key times when disease can be transmitted via hands [...]'
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org