WASH Director Harps On Safe Water, Basic Hygiene

The Director of Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) and Climate,Environment, Energy,and Diaster Risk Reduction (CEED),Kelly Ann Naylor, has emphasised the importance of safe water  and basic hygiene in health care facilities around the world.
This is contained in the latest report  “Progress on WASH in healthcare facilities 2000 – 2021: Special focus on WASH and infection prevention and control”.
According to her,”If health care providers do not have access to a hygiene service, patients don’t have a health care.  Hospitals and clinics without safe water and basic hygiene and sanitation services are a potential death trap for pregnant mothers, newborns and children.  Every year,around 670,000 newborns lose their lives to sepsis.  This is a travesty, even more so as their deaths are preventable”,she said.
The report,which has for the first time established a global baseline on hygiene services has accessed access at points of care as well as toilets, as more countries than ever report on critical elements of WASH Services  in hospitals and health centres.
For hygiene, data are now available for 40 countries, representing 35%of the world’s population, up from 21 countries in 2020 and 14 in 2019.
The report notes that contaminated hands and environments play a significant role in pathogen transmission in health care facilities and the spread of antimicrobial resistance.  Interventions to increase access to handwashing with water and soap and environmental cleaning form of cornerstone of infection prevention and control programmes are crucial to providing quality care, particularly for safe childbirth.
Facilities in sub-Saharan Africa are lagging on hygiene services. While three-quarters (73%) of health care facilities in the region overall have alcohol-based hand rub or water and soap at points of care, only one-third (37%) have handwashing facilities with water and soap at toilets. The vast majority (87%) of hospitals have hand hygiene facilities at points of care, compared to 68% of other healthcare facilities.
In the Least Developed Countries, only 53% of health care facilities have access on-premises to a protected water source. To compare, the global figure is 78% with hospitals (88%) doing better than smaller health care facilities (77%), and the figure for eastern and south-eastern Asia is 90%. Globally, around 3% of health care facilities in urban areas and 11% in rural areas had no water service.
Of the countries with available data, 1 in 10 health care facilities globally had no sanitation service.
The proportion of health care facilities with no sanitation services ranged from 3% in Latin America and the Caribbean and in eastern and south-eastern Asia to 22% in sub-Saharan Africa. In the Least Developed Countries, just 1 in 5 (21%) had basic sanitation services in health care facilities.
The data further reveals that many health care facilities lack basic environmental cleaning and safe segregation and disposal of health care

By: Ibinabo Ogolo