Set up a Suspicious Symptom Reporting Phone
The guidelines require all units to strengthen employee health monitoring, grasp the situation of employee mobility, and conduct health management by area according to local requirements. For example, people from severely affected areas should be observed at home or in centralized medical quarantine; employees who are in the quarantine period and living in collective dormitories should have their body temperature tested twice a day; and the health status of absentees should be known in a timely manner.
At the same time, each unit shall set up a telephone for reporting suspicious symptoms. When employees have fever and respiratory symptoms, they shall report to the unit in good faith. The unit shall summarize the health status of employees daily and report to the local disease control department.

Normal temperature before entering the unit

In terms of workplace epidemic prevention and control, the guidelines require strengthening the management of entry and exit personnel. Among them, units using fingerprint time attendance machines should be temporarily suspended and the entry and exit personnel should be registered by other methods. Each time an employee enters the unit or plant, they should take a temperature check at the entrance, and they can enter only when the temperature is normal. It is necessary to minimize the entry of non-unit personnel. If it is really necessary for the work, the body temperature should be detected, etc. before entering.
Where conditions permit, natural ventilation is preferred in the workplace. If the room temperature is reduced due to ventilation, staff should be reminded to wear appropriate clothing to keep warm. If an air conditioner is used, it should be ensured that the air supply is safe and adequate, and all the exhaust air is directly discharged to the outdoor. When the air conditioner is not used, the return air channel should be closed.
Hand washing equipment should be set up in the workplace, and the hand washing and spraying facilities should keep normal operation. If no hand-washing equipment is available, no-clean disinfection supplies should be provided.
In addition, public areas such as workplaces, canteens, elevators, toilets, sinks, commuting tools and related items should be regularly disinfected by a special person. Elevator buttons, door handles and other frequent contact parts should be appropriately increased the number of disinfection.

Commute or work from home at the wrong time
The guidelines emphasize the need to reduce staff gathering and collective activity. For example, to guide employees to line up in an orderly manner when using aisles, elevators, stairs, and smoking areas, to maintain proper spacing, and not to talk to others when smoking; to reduce the number of meetings that need to be held, shorten the time, control the scale, and maintain the air in the conference room Circulation is encouraged, and video or telephone conferences are encouraged. In principle, each employee’s collective dormitory does not exceed 6 people, and the average per capita is not less than 2.5 square meters. Depending on the actual situation, it can adopt the wrong time to work, flexible work system or home office.
In addition, the unit should appropriately extend the dining room dining time, implement peak shift dining, conditionally use lunch boxes, and scattered meals; strengthen the use of recycled tableware to clean and disinfect, and use disposable tableware without disinfection conditions; employees should avoid meals Sit face to face and don’t talk to others.

A separate observation area must be established

The guidelines require each unit to establish a separate observation area. When employees have suspicious symptoms, go to the area for temporary isolation and report to the local disease control department in time, and arrange for the employees to seek medical treatment in accordance with relevant regulations.
When employees with suspicious symptoms are found, the unit should immediately isolate their work posts and dormitories, and further close their offices, workshops and other office units and living quarters such as employee dormitories based on medical observations. Unrelated personnel are strictly prohibited from entering, and professional guidance Disinfect its activities and use items. Cooperate with relevant parties to make preventive and control measures for close contacts.
For units that have found cases, the epidemiological investigation of cases, follow-up management of close contacts, and disinfection of epidemic sites should be strengthened. Units that have spread the epidemic should temporarily close their workplaces based on the severity of the epidemic and resume production after the epidemic is under control.

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5 Super Clean Facts About Hand Hygiene

1. Handwashing equals happiness

   According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, handwashing can prevent 1 in 3 diarrhea-related illnesses and 1 in 5 infections, including the flu.

2. Beware the twin killers for kids

   About 1.4 million children under age 5 die from diarrheal diseases and pneumonia — the two most deadly afflictions for children worldwide.

3. The dirty secret of public restrooms

   The CDC also reports that only 31 percent of men and 65 percent of women washed their hands after using a public restroom.

4. Handwash your way to health

   Using antibiotics creates antibiotic resistance. Handwashing prevents many sicknesses, so people need less antibiotics. Therefore, less antibiotic resistance.

5. Sneezes are mini hurricanes

   A typical human sneeze exits the body at about 200 miles per hour and emits around 40,000 droplets into the air.

    

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“Frequent hand washing can reduce the chance of infection and transmission of influenza, gastrointestinal illnesses and other illnesses like colds,” says Donna Lahey, head nurse of the Infection Prevention and Control Department in NSHA’s Eastern Zone. “It’s important for everyone – health-care workers, hospital visitors and the public – to wash their hands, particularly during this festive season where people will be taking part in a lot of social gatherings.”

One particularly nasty group of illnesses that shows up this time of year is gastrointestinal illnesses. Many different viruses can cause gastrointestinal illness, including rotaviruses, adenoviruses, caliciviruses, astroviruses and noroviruses. These common viruses can live on any surface and cause an inflammation or infection of the stomach and small and large intestines.

Gastrointestinal illness is often called the “stomach flu,” even though it is not caused by flu viruses. The symptoms of gastrointestinal illnesses include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and stomach cramps. They can also include a low-grade fever, a headache and achy limbs.  Symptoms generally begin 1 or 2 days after contact with a virus that causes gastro illness. The illness may last one day to 10 days, depending on which virus causes it.

“The holidays are a great time to socialize,” says Lahey. “People gather at parties, Christmas concerts, visits with friends and family and go to other social events. While these gatherings are great for spending time with people, they’re also the perfect setting for gastro bugs which thrive in social settings.”

The holidays also happen to fall in the middle of flu season. The flu virus is easily spread by droplets caused by sneezing and coughing. Flu symptoms have a sudden onset and include high fever, severe headache, respiratory discomfort, aches and pains, fatigue, congestion and heavy cough. People should contact their family physicians if their symptoms change, worsen or last more than five days.

“People are always busy and on the go this time of year, more so than others,” says Lahey. “Because of this they sometimes forget to take care of themselves and as a result, may become run down. That makes them susceptible to colds, flu and other illnesses.”

While healthy people recover from these illnesses relatively quickly fashion, they can have a greater impact on young children, the elderly or people with weakened immune systems or chronic illnesses including hospital patients and continuing care residents.

The most important tip to limiting the spread of most illnesses is handwashing, says Lahey.

“Wash your hands regularly and thoroughly after you’ve used the washroom, before you prepare or eat food and after you’ve sneezed or blown your nose.”

Tips to Limit the Spread of Gastro Illness:

• Frequently wash your hands with soap and water, especially after using the washroom or changing diapers, before preparing food, before and after eating and after sneezing, coughing or vomiting

• Thoroughly clean and disinfect surfaces using a bleach-based household cleaner right after someone has vomited or had diarrhea

• Avoid any food or water if it is thought to be contaminated

• Wash clothing or linens used by someone who has vomited or had diarrhea right away with hot water and soap

• Flush or discard any vomit and/or stool in the toilet and make sure the surrounding area is kept clean.

Tips to Limit the Spread of Flu:

• Get the flu shot

• Wash your hands regularly and thoroughly after you’ve used the washroom, before you prepare food and after you’ve sneezed or blown your nose. If hand washing facilities are not available, alcohol based hand sanitizers are also effective.

• Avoid close contact when possible with anyone who has flu like symptoms

• Avoiding large crowds can also help limit the spread of the flu

• Cover your coughs and sneezes so you don t spread germs to other people.  Cough into your sleeve or into your lapel so the fabric traps the droplets and prevents others from breathing them in.

Proper Handwashing Tips

• Wet your hands with warm running water

• Add soap and scrub for about 15 seconds. Wash all parts of your hands-the back, between fingers and under the nails.

• Rinse off soap under running water for 5 to 10 seconds

• Dry your hands with a towel

• Turn off the tap with a towel

• Use separate towels for sick family members

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Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water

• especially after using the toilet or changing diapers
• always before eating, preparing, or handling food, and
• before giving yourself or someone else medicine.

Norovirus can be found in your vomit or poop even before you start feeling sick. The virus can stay in your poop for 2 weeks or more after you feel better. It is important to continue washing your hands often during this time.

You can use alcohol-based hand sanitizers in addition to hand washing. But, you should not use hand sanitizer as a substitute for washing your hands with soap and water. Hand sanitizers aren’t as effective as washing hands with soap and water at removing norovirus particles.

Handle and prepare food safely

Carefully wash fruits and vegetables before preparing and eating them. Cook oysters and other shellfish thoroughly before eating them.

Be aware that noroviruses are relatively resistant to heat. They can survive temperatures as high as 145°F and quick steaming processes that are often used for cooking shellfish.

Food that might be contaminated with norovirus should be thrown out.

Keep sick infants and children out of areas where food is being handled and prepared.

When you are sick, do not prepare food or care for others

You should not prepare food for others or provide healthcare while you are sick and for at least 2 days after symptoms stop. This also applies to sick workers in restaurants, schools, daycares, long-term care facilities, and other places where they may expose people to norovirus.

Clean and disinfect surfaces

After someone vomits or has diarrhea, always thoroughly clean and disinfect the entire area immediately. Put on rubber or disposable gloves, and wipe the entire area with paper towels, then disinfect the area using a bleach-based household cleaner as directed on the product label. Leave the bleach disinfectant on the affected area for at least five minutes then clean the entire area again with soap and hot water. Finish by cleaning soiled laundry, taking out the trash, and washing your hands.

To help make sure that food is safe from norovirus, routinely clean and sanitize kitchen utensils, counters, and surfaces before preparing food.

You should use a chlorine bleach solution with a concentration of 1000 to 5000 ppm (5 to 25 tablespoons of household bleach [5% to 8%] per gallon of water) or other disinfectant registered as effective against norovirus by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Wash laundry thoroughly

Immediately remove and wash clothes or linens that may be contaminated with vomit or poop.

You should:

• handle soiled items carefully without agitating them,
• wear rubber or disposable gloves while handling soiled items and wash your hands after, and
• wash the items with detergent and hot water at the maximum available cycle length then machine dry them at the highest heat setting.

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Hygiene in surgical care SAVES LIVES: wash your hands. The improvement of hand hygiene practices in surgical services is a priority.

After 10 years of the WHO program “Clean care is safer care”, these are the 10 reasons why you should participate in the campaign:

Hand hygiene at the right time saves lives.

Hand hygiene in health care has saved millions of lives in recent years.

Hand hygiene is a quality indicator that highlights the safety of health systems.

Health problems, such as infections associated with health care (IAAS), which are often invisible but nevertheless occur, are political and social challenges that we must address.

Infections can be avoided by good hand hygiene, and damage to the health of patients and health care personnel can be prevented for less than $ 10.

There is low cost technology to save lives! The alcohol-based disinfectant solution, which costs approximately $ 3 per bottle, can prevent IAAS and millions of deaths each year.

There is #handhygiene in social media, which means that it is an important issue, either due to IAAS or outbreaks due to deadly diseases such as Ebola.

Incorporating the specific moments for the action of hand hygiene in the workflow of health workers makes it easy to do the right thing every minute, every hour, every day.

Infection prevention is a fundamental part of strengthening health systems. Hand hygiene is the basis of all interventions, either by inserting an invasive medical device, manipulating a surgical wound, or when performing an injection.

The social epidemic has already begun to be transmitted with “Save lives: clean your hands”, a successful campaign that promotes the action of hand washing at the point of patient care.

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For effective control of infections through hand washing, you should also ensure that not only your hands are completely clean after washing, but also that the hand drying system is most suitable.

Infection prevention and infection control have always been serious issues, but this is particularly true today, with the spread of infections acquired in the hospital.

ETS asked a research team at the University of Westminster, led by microbiologist Keith Redway, to study the hygienic behavior of various hand drying methods, to take into account technology and product development, including the dryer to newly introduced new-generation air jet, which had not been evaluated in previous comparative studies. The main methodology used in this study is the same one that had been used in the previous University of Westminster studies on the subject in 1993/1998.

Are electric hot air dryers the right solution?

This latest study has compared the performance of paper towels compared to two types of electric air hand dryers: both hot air hand dryers and new ultra-fast hand dryers increase the average number of bacteria in the hands after use, while paper towels reduce it.

The ultra-fast dryers, which use high-speed air (up to 600 km / h) also showed a higher risk of spreading micro-drops, potentially contaminated, to other users and on the various surfaces of the bathroom, compared to other drying systems verified in this study . In addition, like traditional hot-air hand dryers, they can be contaminated by bacteria, some of which can cause disease.

Press release:

Press release: New evidence shows that electric hand dryers can put health at risk (Feb. 2009 in Italian) (Feb. 2009 in English)

Hand hygiene is a serious matter: in order to eliminate microorganisms and avoid infections, the same attention given to a large part of hospitals should be applied to hand drying.

To avoid infections and infections, the guidelines given to doctors and patients contemplate washing hands carefully, using soap, and then drying them with a paper towel, which has the property of significantly reducing the germs and viruses that remain in the hands.

This healthy hand hygiene practice, indicated by health specialists, keeps the risk of possible infections under control and prevents their spread.

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The factors identified that influence the reduction of adherence to hand washing are:

1. Categories of workers: technicians, doctors, nurse (in that order), male sex;
2. Hospital area: minor in NICU,
3. Time of day and week: less on weekends,
4. Type and intensity of patient care: the greater the contact the less adhesion,
5. Activities with risk of contamination, use of gloves and nightgown, greater risk less adherence.
6. The reasons of the health staff for low adherence were related to skin irritation, inaccessibility of the dispenser, interference in the relationship with the patient, the patient perceived as a priority, use of gloves, loss of time, ignorance of the guidelines, overwork (inadequate nurse-patient relationship) and insufficient time, ignorance of the impact of proper hand hygiene on nosocomial infection.

Skin irritation is the most important barrier to hand hygiene; the greater the washing, the pH of the skin increases, the lipid content is reduced, the loss of trans-epidermal water and bacterial colonization increases. The use of alcohol gels, which add to the bactericidal power of alcohol emollient substances, are less irritating and better tolerated than soapy solutions, keep the skin protected and reduce bacterial development.

A complex and dynamic change in behavior to achieve greater adherence includes the combination of education, motivation and systematic information coupled with the perception of possible alternatives.

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Some believe automated systems can increase hand hygiene compliance because they make a tedious chore quicker and more fun, as well as thorough and more uniform than a manual “splash-and-dash” approach commonly used by harried HCWs. Resurgent Health and Medical’s Radius Automated Handwashing and Monitoring System is a fully automated, touchless system available in healthcare for mechanical handwashing, rinsing and sanitizing. It performs a 10-second cycle using a chlorhexidine gluconate-based sanitizing solution, delivered by high-pressure water jets that perform a consistent wash-and-sanitize cycle every time the machine is used.

“We’re committed to helping achieve ‘zero tolerance’ in the prevention of healthcare-acquired infections,” says Jim Glenn, CEO of Resurgent Health and Medical. “Our new Radius system brings to healthcare a proven technology that has enabled other critical industries to achieve near-perfect elimination of infectious workplace pathogens. Furthermore, the Radius system introduces a total prevention approach by automating measurement and documentation of handwashing compliance.”

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For washing to be really effective, you should always use soap. If you use them properly, all soaps are equally effective in removing germs that cause disease.

If you don’t have soap, you can eventually replace it with gel alcohol.

It is important that you wash your hands:

Before and after handling food or breastfeeding.

Before eating or drinking and after handling garbage or waste.

After touching raw food and before touching cooked food.

After using the bathroom, blowing your nose, coughing or sneezing, and after changing the baby’s diapers.

After having touched “dirty” objects, such as money, keys, handrails, etc.

When you get to the house from the street, work, school.

After having been in contact with animals.

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According to a study published in the Pediatrics Magazine. Spanish researchers demonstrated that children who used hand sanitizers instead of soap and water reduced their days of illness, suffered less respiratory infections and used less antibiotic prescriptions.

“Washing hands as a way to prevent infections is no longer new. We are now paying more attention to the fact that it is not just about washing your hands, but how to wash your hands. ” Janet Haas, epidemiologist of the Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.
The sample of the study was of 911 small children (up to 3 years) of 24 different nursery schools in the province of Almeria.
For the realization of the study, children, their families and their kindergarten were divided into three groups:

1. The first group used disinfecting hands to clean hands.

2. The second sample used water and soap with strict protocols.

3. And the third party was a control group that followed its usual routines of hand washing.

The study lasted 8 months, during which the hand disinfectant group recorded 3.25% of lost day care days. The group of water and soap lost 3.9%. The group that followed their usual hand washing routine lost 4.2%.

The study demonstrated the advantages of including a disinfectant in hand washing. The group that used hand sanitizers recorded a 23% decrease in respiratory infections among students, compared to those of the control group that followed the usual guidelines for hand hygiene.

The study also concluded that the group that used water and soap had a 21% higher risk of getting a respiratory infection and a 3% higher prescription of antibiotics than children who used hand sanitizers.

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