Prioritise hand hygiene to help prevent infections in hospitals- NCDC

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has urged healthcare workers to put hand hygiene at the top of their must-do list, noting that it is crucial to preventing infections in hospitals.

The Antimicrobial Resistant and Infection and Control Programme coordinator at NCDC, Dr. Tochi Okwor, Made this call in a virtual session held on Twitter by The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control in collaboration with DRASA Health Trust, a non-profit organisation.

This session was held in commemoration of the 2022 World Hand Hygiene Day, themed, United for Safety: Clean your hands.

She noted that hand hygiene is one of the best investments we can make in healthcare.
Okwor further explained that hands can move infection from one place to another, stressing that hygiene is the most important measure to prevent infection.

Hand hygiene, she said, is often called the cornerstone of infection prevention.

“Normally, patients come to hospitals and expect that they get better and go home from whatever ails them, but the hands that are supposed to bring comfort and healing can also become vehicles of death if they take diseases, germs, microorganisms that can cause severe diseases and introduce them to parts of our patient where it can result in severe infection,” the NCDC official said.

She further stressed that keeping our hands safe is truly fundamental.
“The hands can move microorganisms, bacteria that cause infection from one part of the hospital, from one part of the patient to a part of the patient where it can cause infection,” she said.

According to her, the World Health Organisation has identified what they call the five moments for hand hygiene.
“Those five moments have been found that if we as health workers can render our hands safe and free of disease-causing microorganisms, then we would be very successful in reducing healthcare-associated infections.

Those infections that patients didn’t have before they came to the hospital but then acquired when they came to the hospital care.

“Just as the hands are central in bringing healing, the hands are also central in transmitting infection,” she said.

Also speaking at the virtual session, a Nigerian professor of medical microbiology, Folasade Ogunsola said, “healthcare provision has become rather complex in the last few decades with teams of professionals working together with technology and various processes.

“So it is unsurprising that an estimated one in 10 patients is harmed while receiving hospital care in high-income countries and we know that over 134,000,000 adverse events occur in hospitals in lower-middle-income countries such as ours, Nigeria, due to unsafe care that results in about 2.6 million deaths annually.”

“Essentially healthcare can be dangerous and we really need to be intentional about making sure patients are not harmed by avoidable incidents,” Ogunsola said.

MTO/Punch