Primary Health Care Corporation officials holding a press conference on ‘Save lives: clean your hands’ campaign. PICTURE: Noushad Thekkayil
By Joey Aguilar/Staff Reporter
The “Save lives: clean your hands,” campaign in Qatar, under the slogan “Clean care is safer care,” will focus on educating schoolchildren and their families on the importance of hand hygiene this year, an official of the Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC) has said.
Durriya al-Qahtani, director of Performance Improvement at PHCC, told Gulf Times that they also see the opportunity to educate teachers in various schools in the country. A global celebration will be held on May 5 led by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
“Students are our young versions so whenever you embed this small practices in them, that would make it easier later so they can continue to practice hand hygiene,” she noted.
Al-Qahtani reiterated the importance of hand hygiene saying it is the simplest and easiest way to prevent antibiotic resistant infections and different germs from entering into the body and cause more harm .
She explained that usual germs can be killed with specific medications, drugs or antibiotics. But some “younger generations of germs” have the ability to reprogramme their DNAs to become immune to antibiotics.
The doctor described it as “DNA re-engineering”, possibly a kind of germ mutation where medications could no longer work and treatment may not be available to any patient infected with these types of germs.
“We don’t want to go to this level that is why we are using something very simple, something not expensive at all and we are making people aware of the importance of the proper way of washing their hands,” she added.
The doctor said the practice may seem simple but she believes it has a big impact in protecting people from life-threatening infections. “This is life-saving,” she stressed.
PHCC has been reminding its healthcare providers to clean their hands before touching the patient and after examining the patient.
Dr Ahmad Hashem Basuney, risk management co-ordinator at PHCC, echoed the statements of Al-Qahtani saying hand washing is one of the most effective methods to control infections and break a chain of transmission from the patient to the healthcare provider and vice versa.
He said hand washing was initially implemented among their staff and healthcare providers in 2009, four years after the WHO launched the global campaign.
PHCC operates 21 primary healthcare centres in three regions of the country: central, western and northern. Thirteen of these centres are located in Doha while the rest operate in populated areas in the country.
Basuney noted that staff compliance rate had increased significantly from 32% to 49% in 2013. During the first quarter of this year, it surged to 81% compared with the 49% in the same period in 2013 and 31% in 2012.
“This shows that after implementing our policies, the staff become more aware of the patient’s safety,” he said.
PHCC cited a report noting that since the 1840’s, there had been some evidence that hand hygiene is effective in reducing the transmission of infection. But 150 years later, with all the evidence available, compliance of healthcare workers to hand hygiene was seen in the early 2000’s to be universally low.
“Patients and visitors of PHCC health centres, schools and the community at large need to know that hand hygiene is essential for all of us to practice when we visit health care facilities and in our everyday life,” said PHCC Risk Management section manager Jacqueline Sutton in a press statement.
Saying that more infections are proving to be more resistant to treatment, she lamented that no new antibiotics are being developed and the last new effective antibiotic was released more than 10 years ago.
Besides the high cost of healthcare nowadays, she stressed that antibiotic resistant infections are becoming more common and more devastating.
But since the first campaign in 2009, she pointed out that hand hygiene compliance has been audited and improved considerably.
