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The following is issued on behalf of the Hospital Authority:
The Hospital Authority (HA) launched a "hand hygiene" programme today (January 21) to promote the culture of hand hygiene among healthcare professionals in public hospitals. Hong Kong is the first to launch such a programme in all public hospitals among the six Evaluation Sites of World Health Organization (WHO). The ceremony to launch the programme was officiated by Professor Didier Pittet, WHO representative, Mr Anthony Wu, HA Chairman, and Mr Shane Solomon, HA Chief Executive.
Addressing at the ceremony, Mr Solomon said, "Clean hands are safer hands. It is so important for patient care. Patient safety has always been our priority. This patient care campaign is about creating a new culture among healthcare colleagues.
"We launched a hand hygiene campaign for the very first time in 2003. Today is another milestone. We support the WHO's campaign in promoting hand hygiene and it's about encouraging our healthcare colleagues to use alcohol based hand rub most of the time."
According to Dr Seto Wing-hong, the Chief Infection Control Officer of HA, "Being the first to launch such a programme in all public hospitals among the WHO evaluation sites, the HA encourages our healthcare workers to bring along an alcohol hand rub and clean their hands between caring for patients in order to reduce cross infection and to improve patients safety.
"Hand hygiene is one of the most important procedures for preventing infection. Bacteria take time to breed on a particular surface. In order to stop the spreading of bacteria, the most effective way is to clean hands regularly. However, the daily work of healthcare workers is so urgent that they may not be able to wash hands with water and soap, and some of them even developed hand irritation with too frequent hand-washing. However, in view of the fact that hand hygiene can help reduce cross infection, the HA adopts the WHO-formulation alcohol hand rub which contains skin emollients with proven antiseptic properties. The HA encourages frontline staff to bring a bottle with them when carrying out their duties and to rub it on their hands, even if they don't have visible dirt on them, in order to reduce healthcare associated infections."
Hong Kong has signed a pledge to introduce the WHO hand hygiene programme in 2006, and the territory was selected as one of the six international evaluation sites. The programme was first pilot tested in 2006 in four HA hospitals--Caritas Medical Centre, Queen Mary Hospital, Tuen Mun Hospital and Yan Chai Hospital. The pilot programme evaluated hand hygiene compliance among healthcare workers and infection rates before and after implementation of the programme. Initial results showed that the hand hygiene compliance rate increased while the infection rate has shown a downward trend. The HA therefore plans to roll out the programme to all public hospitals in the seven Hospital Clusters.
Ends/Monday, January 21, 2008
Issued at HKT 20:26
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