Dubai: The UAE has signed up to an international campaign to improve hygiene standards and cut the spread of infection in hospitals.

Both government and private hospitals will be involved in the initiative, which will focus on things such as more frequent handwashing by hospital staff.

The UAE joined the World Health Organisation Global Patient Safety Challenge when Minister of Health Humaid Mohammad Obaid Al Qutami signed a document this week as part of the Patient Safety Congress taking place at the Crowne Plaza. The theme of the challenge is "Clean Care is Safer Care".

Professor Didier Pittit, leader of the Global Patient Safety Challenge, said: "Health-care associated infections are waiting for people at the hospital door and there is no healthcare system in the world that can claim to have solved the problem.

"Around the world, compliance with good practice is less than 40 per cent, so this makes it a very important time for the UAE to join.

Duty

"The challenge is not an option: it is a duty to patients, their families and healthcare workers."

Infections that spread through hospitals cost tens of thousands of lives each year across the world and in the United Kingdom alone they have been blamed for 5,000 deaths annually.

Experts are particularly keen to promote the use of alcohol-based hand cleaning as this is quicker than using soap and water and so is useful for healthcare staff that have to clean their hands many times a day.

Dr Ali Bin Shakar, Undersecretary at the Ministry of Health, told Gulf News the UAE was already close to achieving the standard demanded by the challenge.

"We have signed not because we haven't started, but we have signed because we want to upgrade our procedures.

"We're going to initiate workshops in hospitals for hand hygiene.

"We have to repeat and repeat the message to remind our people how important it is," he said, adding that the workshops would be carried out with staff from both private and public hospitals.

Bin Shakar said there would be an extra focus on the UAE's national infection control committee in the wake of the signing.

Among the countries that have already joined the Global Patient Safety Challenge, which was launched in October last year, are The Netherlands, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Bahrain and the United Kingdom.

Like the UAE, Bangla-desh joined this week, while China, Mali, Malta, Spain, Sudan and Oman are set to sign up this year.

Residents admit to lax standards

More than one third of UAE residents admit to failing to wash their hands before eating or handling food, according to a survey released this week.

Six per cent also said they do not wash their hands even after they have gone to the toilet, according to the poll carried out by the Hygiene Council, which was set up by disinfectant manufacturer Reckitt Benckiser.

Four out of 10 residents revealed they do not wash their hands after sneezing or coughing, while 18 per cent fail to do so when they have handled animals.

Professor John Oxford, a virologist at Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry in London and chairman of the Hygiene Council, said even when people here do wash their hands, they fail to do it thoroughly.

He said: "People just put their hands under the tap quickly and it's not good enough. The level of cleaning has to be increased."

Oxford added that 21st century living was creating new ways of spreading infection, such as through the use of shared laptop computer keyboards.