Pretoria - Healthcare workers should always wash their hands before attending to patients, Gauteng MEC for health Qedani Mahlangu said on Monday.
“We are operating within the broader framework of the national core standards. Let us all commit to reducing hospital health-care facility infection,” she said at the Steve Biko Academic Hospital in Pretoria.
“We know that there has been a lot of negative things that have been creeping into the health sector - health employees behaving in a manner that is not in keeping with what health professionals must do. We had employees answering cellphones while treating patients.”
Mahlangu was representing Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi at the launch of the health professionals hand hygiene campaign.
The Pretoria event will be followed on Tuesday by the launch of a countrywide campaign at most of South African public and private healthcare institutions to ensure hand hygiene is enforced.
Health department director-general Precious Matsoso said patients should insist that health-care workers wash their hands.
“One of the WHO [World Health Organisation] campaigns is about patient safety. As part of that campaign, hand hygiene is also a prominent feature. We need to have good practices,” said Matsoso.
“We are saying clean hands are safer hands. Are yours clean? We need to get the public to ask us, as health providers, not to touch them unless we wash our hands. They must say ‘doctor don’t touch me, you haven’t washed your hands’.”
In November 2014, the WHO declared May 5 global health professionals hand hygiene day, with the theme “save lives – clean your hands”.
According to the WHO website, the campaign advocates for health-care workers to improve and sustain hand hygiene practices at the right times and in the right way to help reduce the spread of potentially life-threatening infections at medical facilities.
Dr Augustine Ntilivamunda, senior medical officer for communicable diseases at the WHO, said hand washing has to be inculcated in children.
“Hand washing, which we take for granted most of the time, is a simple and powerful measure of reducing infectious disease being spread by hand contact.”
He said the spread of infections including trachoma, influenza and Ebola could be dealt a blow by consistent, thorough hand washing.
ANA