Health Ministry starts ‘Clean Your Hands’ campaign Saturday

The Kingdom will join the World Health Organization (WHO) in observing the organization’ global annual “Clean Your Hands” campaign on Saturday, the Ministry of Health announced in Riyadh yesterday. “Cleaning hands in proper ways prevents a number of diseases including hepatitis-A, diarrheal diseases, and intestinal parasites. It also prevents bacteria that cause infections in health facilities,” Director General of the General Department of Combating Infection at the Ministry of Health Dr. Abdullah Al-Asiri said in Riyadh. Al-Asiri said this year, his department carried out 12 training courses for 260 health workers and eight workshops in collaboration with the World Health Organization on various factors that affect the general health of people. The director general explained the observance of this day would include a number of scientific meetings to educate employees. The community members will be honored as outstanding workers in health facilities in the area of hand hygiene, he added. He pointed out that there are several places in the human body that remain vulnerable to bacterial infections, especially the palm, nails and fingers, adding hand washing could solve these basic problems. There are also millions of bacteria living on human skin that does not harm people in natural conditions, he noted. According to WHO, each year hundreds of millions of patients around the world are affected by health care-associated infections (HCAIs). Although HCAIs are the most frequent adverse events in health care, its true global burden remains unknown because of the difficulty in gathering reliable data. Understanding and assessing the global burden of HCAI is one of the key areas of work of the “Clean Care is Safer Care” program. Most health care-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 health care support hand hygiene promotion and improvement in health-care facilities worldwide and are complemented by the WHO multimodal hand hygiene improvement strategy, the guide to implementation, and implementation toolkit that contains 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.