Each year, hundreds of millions of patients around the world are affected by health care-associated infections (HCAIs). Although HCAI is the most frequent adverse event in health care, its true global burden remains unknown because of the difficulty in gathering reliable data. Understanding and assessing the global burden of HCAI is one of the key areas of work of the IPC global unit. Systematic reviews of the literature have been conducted to identify published studies from both developed and developing countries and highlight the magnitude of the HCAI problem. Some of these results were published online on 10 December 2010 in The Lancet, and are compiled in a comprehensive WHO Report on the burden of endemic health care-associated infection worldwide.
The My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene approach defines the key moments when health-care workers should perform hand hygiene.
This evidence-based, field-tested, user-centred approach is designed to be easy to learn, logical and applicable in a wide range of settings.
This approach recommends health-care workers to clean their hands
- before touching a patient,
- before clean/aseptic procedures,
- after body fluid exposure/risk,
- after touching a patient, and
- after touching patient surroundings.
Source: WHO
