Africa Signs for Patient Safety

(PANA)--Ministers of health from 39 African countries have signed on to the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s global campaign aimed at ensuring the safety of patients.

To join the campaign, tagged the ‘First global patient safety campaign’, the ministers signed a pledge in Yaoundé, Cameroon, Wednesday committing their countries t o certain actions to reduce health care-associated infection through concrete actions. The signing was held at an impressive ceremony on the sidelines of the current 58th session of the WHO regional committee for Africa in the Cameroonian political l capital.

Prior to the elaborate signing ceremony, organised by the World Alliance for Patient Safety - a WHO progamme in the Information, evidence and research cluster - only eight African countries (Uganda, Kenya, Mali, Senegal, Rwanda, Egypt, Mozambique and Sudan) had signed the pledge.

With the signing on Wednesday, most African nations have now joined over 80 countries of the world which have earlier made political commitment to action by signing the pledge. By the end of the year, countries representing over 80 per cent of the world’s population would have signed up to the campaign.

The flagship of the campaign is the WHO’s ‘Cleaner care is safer care’ initiative, which works toward catalysing global commitment and action to reduce health care-associated infections (HAI) worldwide.

The first challenge, which was launched in 2005, has also reached beyond hand hygiene, and attention has been focused on the promotion of clear care practices in their broadest sense, relating to established WHO programmes concerned with injection and immunisation safety, emergency and surgical procedure safety, blood transfusion safety and safe water and sanitation.

According to WHO, HAI is a global problem, with over 1.4 million people suffering from it at any given time. It is estimated that in hospitals in developed countries, 5 per cent to 10 per cent of patients acquire one or more infections in health facilities, the risk being two to 20 times higher in developing countries, with patients undergoing surgery being the most affected.

The Alliance said that at the core of the initiative is the newly-developed WHO guidelines on hand hygiene in health care and a range of novel, practical and adaptable tools to aid implementation of the recommendations of the WHO multimodal and hygiene improvement strategy. Simply put, it encourages health care personnel to wash their hands after every contact with patients.

To sidetrack the problem of lack of clean water or soap in most developing countries, the WHO has developed an alcohol-based hand rub, which was presented to the ministers at the occasion. The rub, contained in pocket-sized plastic bottles, can be produced cheaply by the different countries for use in their hospitals and other health care institutions.

The signing ceremony was chaired by the minister of health of Uganda, Dr. Stephen Mallinga, and attended by Sir Liam Donaldson, chair of World Alliance for patient safety and chief medical officer, England. Others at the ceremony included Prof. Didier Pittet, external lead for the first global patient safety challenge, Lord Naren Patel, chair of the National patient safety agency, UK and Ms. Robinah Kaitirimba, Patients for patient safety champion.

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