The
Newsletter of the Pan American Health Organization - December
200722 Countries Pledge Cleaner Health Care
Photo: © Gilles Collette/PAHO
Ministers of health from 22 member countries of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) have pledged to fight healthcare-associated infections through a series of actions that include improving hand hygiene among healthcare providers.
Ministers and high-level delegates from eight countries in Latin America and 14 in the Caribbean all signed on to the "First Global Patient Safety Challenge: Clean Care is Safer Care," an initiative of the World Alliance for Patient Safety – World Health Organization (WHO) that seeks to reduce healthcareassociated infections through improvements in blood safety, injection practices, water and sanitation, safety of clinical procedures, and hand hygiene. PAHO countries will focus their initial efforts on hand hygiene, based on the WHO Guidelines for Hand Hygiene, which emphasize the systematic use of alcohol-based hand rubs by healthcare workers before and after contact with patients.
Healthcare-associated infections are a growing problem in the PAHO region and around the world. In the United States, about 2 million people acquire healthcare-associated infections each year, resulting in some 80,000 deaths. In Mexico, an estimated 450,000 patients get healthcare-associated infections each year, resulting in more than 35,000 deaths.
According to the WHO Guidelines for Hand Hygiene, poor hand hygiene is the leading cause of healthcare-associated infections, and improved hand hygiene has been shown in studies to be effective in reducing rates of healthcare-acquired infections.
Ministers from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama signed their joint statement in support of the Clean Care initiative during the National Forum on Quality of Health Care in Mexico City in September. Ministers from Anguilla (a British territory), Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago signed a similar declaration prior to the opening of the Pan American Sanitary Conference in Washington, D.C., in October.
Canada, Costa Rica, and the United States signed similar declarations earlier this year. So far, 55 countries around the world have signed on to the Clear Care initiative, and more are expected to do so by the end of this year.
PAHO, with support from WHO's World Alliance for Patient Safety, is coordinating a pilot project to test the Clean Care approach in Costa Rica, and similar projects are in the planning stages in other countries of the America.
For more information you can visit WHO's Patient Safety web page.
Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Peru will participate in a study of patient safety and adverse events in hospitals, sponsored and coordinated by PAHO, the World Alliance for Patient Safety of the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Quality Agency of Spain's Ministry of Health and Consumer Affairs.
The Prevalence of Adverse Events in Hospitals from Latin America Study (IBEAS) will review all in-patient clinical records from selected hospitals over a given time period in 2007 to assess the magnitude, importance, and impact of adverse events and to analyze the patient and healthcare characteristics associated with such events.
The results will help improve knowledge of patient safety, increase the involvement of healthcare professionals in patient safety, and provide tools and experiences that are applicable throughout the PAHO region.
The study's scientific directors are Jesus Aranáz and Carlos Aibar, chiefs of preventive medicine at (respectively) the St. Joan d'Alacant and Lozano Blesa university hospitals in Spain.
