Cleaning care for everyone is in your hands

Nowadays, many medical staff still do not really realize the importance of hand hygiene. The compliance of hand hygiene (in short: washing hands at the time of hand hygiene as required) is still very low. Some people have a pair of gloves to contact many patients, some people only change gloves and do not wash their hands. Some people think that it is necessary to wash their hands when wearing gloves. Some people will not use standard washing methods and wash their hands in the form.

Do you know how hard the human society’s understanding of the health of the opponents has gone through?

150 years ago, there was no concept of “sanitization and sterilization” in the world; the doctor dissected the body in one second, and immediately performed other operations in the next second, without changing clothes or washing hands.

What prevented this scene from continuing was the Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis (Ignaz Semmelweis).

Hungarian Obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis

In 1846, Ignaz Semmelweis was appointed to the head of the First Obstetrics and Gynecology Clinic affiliated to the Vienna General Hospital, which also had another second obstetrics clinic. As the total hospitalization of the first obstetric clinic, he was surprised to find that the first obstetric clinic had a maternal mortality rate of 10% due to fever, but the second was less than 4%.

This caused Ignaz Semmelweis to question: the two facilities are equipped with the same facilities, why is the death rate so different?

After the data was known to the public, the people suddenly “talked about the color change in the first clinic.” Some of them were pregnant and they would cry to the first obstetric clinic. They couldn’t be screwed up. They would rather be born on the road, so they would not have to go to the clinic. Can enjoy other benefits.

To subvert his idea, the proportion of maternal women who are born on the street is lower because of calving fever. “It is reasonable to say that the outside environment should be more dirty. Is there a deadly virus in the hospital?”

After careful investigation and coincidence, he focused the crux on the medical staff.

It turned out that the first clinic was a teaching hospital, which was responsible for teaching tasks. The staff needed to dissect the body to give lectures. Sometimes the hand that had just been dissected had to help the mother to deliver the baby. The second clinic was mostly an obstetric medical student who did not touch the body. The incidence of calving fever is lower.

Another way of saying this is that one of his colleagues died of sepsis after accidentally cutting his hand at the autopsy, which made Semmelweis aware that it was possible that the substance in the hands of doctors and interns had caused calving fever. He named this unknown substance pale particles. )

To this end, Ignaz Semmelweis proposed that all medical staff wash their hands with chlorine-containing disinfectant water before the treatment. After everyone made his request, the maternal mortality rate dropped below 2%.

What is incredible to the contemporary people is that the Vienna General Hospital does not recognize the discovery of Semmelweis, because they felt that his discovery was insulting the hospital’s honor, and he did not renew his work contract and swept it out.

Moreover, his family did not understand him and support him. Finally, his family deceived the “father of hospital infection control” into a mental hospital where he was beaten in a mental hospital and died of sepsis, at the age of 47.

In the 1870s, the microbiologist Pasteur discovered streptococcus, and the idea of ​​Ignaz Semmelweis began to receive attention. The medical community also confirmed that hemolytic streptococcus is a key pathogen in the occurrence of sputum fever, and iatrogenic factors, The lack of disinfection and cross-infection in the hospital is an important cause of transmission. The concept of “hand disinfection” has since entered the medical profession, and “hospital infections” have received increasing attention. As a result, the “hand disinfection” program has saved countless lives.

100 years later…

In 1961, the United States began requiring medical staff to wash their hands with soap before and after receiving patients.

Hand hygiene is the most cost-effective way to prevent hospital-related infections!

The hand is the most important way to spread hospital infections;

It is estimated that you can save 1,000,000 lives of sick people by washing your hands every year! (from the World Health Organization WHO network)

Since 2009, the World Health Organization initiative launched May 5th each year as World Hand Sanitation Day, which aims to emphasize the importance of improving the hand hygiene of medical staff and reducing iatrogenic infections during medical care.

Proposed by the World Health Organization on May 5, 2019

Slogan:

1. Everyone’s cleaning care – just in your hands

2. The medical workers: “Leading clean care – is in your hands.”

3. Infection prevention and control leader: “Monitoring infection prevention and control standards – taking action to improve practice.”

4. Medical institutions: “Does your institution meet WHO’s infection control and hand hygiene standards? Participate in the WHO 2019 survey and act!”

5. Health sector: “Is your country meeting the standards for infection prevention and control? Monitor and act to achieve quality universal health coverage.”

6. Patient advocacy organization: “Requires cleansing care – this is your right.”

After WHO launched the “Clean and Safer” plan, there are 10 reasons why you should also be involved:

1. Keeping your hands clean at the right time saves your life.

2. Maintaining hand hygiene in health care has saved millions of lives in the past few years.

3. Hand hygiene is a quality indicator of a safe healthcare system.

4. Problems such as health care-related infections are often intangible but still occurring. These are the political and social challenges we must address now.

5. Good hand hygiene can prevent infection, and less than $10 can prevent patients and health workers from being harmed.

6. There are already affordable life-saving technologies available! The ethanol-based hand sanitizer is about $3 a bottle, which prevents health care-associated infections and prevents millions of deaths every year.

7. There is a theme tag in the media – #handhygiene, which indicates that hand hygiene is an important issue due to health care-related infections or due to fatal diseases such as Ebola.

8. Incorporate specific moments in the implementation of hand hygiene measures into the workflow of health care workers, so that the right actions can be taken every day and every day.

9. Prevention of infection is the key to strengthening the health care system. Hand hygiene is essential for all interventions, whether insertion of invasive devices, management of surgical wounds, or injections.

10. This social initiative has been promoted with the help of a successful global campaign entitled “Save Lives: Clean Your Hands” to promote hand hygiene in patient care settings.