Friday, February 14, 2020

Not possible to fully enforce hand hygiene at GRH: Dean

TNN | Feb 14, 2020, 04.49 AM IST

Madurai: Government healthcare centres in the city including primary health centres, community health centres (CHC) and Government Rajaji Hospital (GRH) actively started enforcing hand hygiene only after the novel coronavirus (nCoV) breakout across the globe, said health officials and staff on Thursday.

However, officials at GRH have said they are not able to completely enforce hand hygiene owing to the huge patient footfall and attenders. Despite round-the-clock cleaning by sanitation workers, many spots in the hospital are still unclean.

“We are trying our best to keep the wards and corridors clean and the situation has improved much now compared to few years ago. We are also trying to restrict the number of attenders as well to prevent spread of infection but it is difficult because we always face opposition to it,” said GRH dean Dr J Sangumani.

The dean also said that it was not practical to strictly enforce hand hygiene in a tertiary healthcare centre. “Currently we are strictly keeping hand sanitizers and hand washing solutions outside ICUs and infection-prone wards, enforcing hand hygiene for attenders. However, we can’t keep it for public use in the campus or for outpatients because many tend to misuse it,” said Dr Sangumani.

The best way to prevent the spread of nCoV or any viral infection, as prescribed by the World Health Organisation (WHO), is practising hand and cough hygiene. “We always used to create awareness about hand hygiene and try to enforce it at all healthcare centres. However, it wasn’t strict enough before and some used to be a little careless. But, after nCoV breakout, though there has been no case in Tamil Nadu, the onus fell on hand hygiene,” said a city health official.

Health centres in the city have kept hand washing solutions or hand sanitizers for public use and healthcare workers are also actively educating patients and attenders about hand hygiene, including the recommended six-step reverse hand washing method, cough hygiene and nCoV.

“We are also keeping surgical spirit at the entrance of our CHC and are asking all those who visit to sanitize their hands when they leave,” said a medical officer at Sellur CHC.

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