By Our Staff Reporter
Dehradun, 5 Apr: World Health Organization (WHO) has declared 5 May as Hand Hygiene Day. This year’s theme is “Seconds save lives – clean your hands!” It is the day to raise awareness on maintaining hand hygiene and making soap and water available globally, especially in public places. Health care workers are advised to achieve effective hand hygiene action at the point of care. This is where three elements come together: the patient, the health care worker, and treatment involving contact with the patient or their surroundings.
On this occasion, Sanjay Orthopaedic, Spine and Maternity Centre, Jakhan, organised a free public awareness webinar. Lectures were delivered by Padma Shri Awardee Dr BKS Sanjay and spine surgeon Dr Gaurav Sanjay in which both emphasised the importance of clean hands. According to WHO, every year millions of patient around the world are dying due to infections. More than half of these can be prevented by proper cleaning of hands, especially before eating the food, after using the toilet and before and after touching a patient.
They emphasised that practice of hand hygiene is more relevant in the current scenario when more than 150 million have been infected and more than 3 million people have died worldwide. More than 20 million have been infected and more than 2 hundred thousand have died in India as of today.
Dr Sanjay said that many times infection is due to hospital acquired infections and poor hand hygiene of patients’ attendants. The hospital staff has to touch one patient after another patient or multiple patients at a time and in such a way the infection is spread from one to another. The hands of these hospital staff workers act as a vector for infection. he main problem in our country is the lack of continuous running clean water and under washing of hands for less than 30 seconds. Both these problems can be tackled with the commercially available, alcohol based hand sanitiser which takes almost 20 seconds to wash the hands.
According to Dr Gaurav Sanjay, investing in hand hygiene yields huge returns. Implementation of hand hygiene policies can generate economic savings averaging 16 times the cost of their implementation. He also appealed to society that a habit of hand washing should be inculcated in childhood in homes and in schools.