Press Release
Hong Kong participates at tele-conference on hand hygiene
10 November 2006
Hong Kong today (November 10) took part in an international tele-conference organized by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to celebrate the first anniversary of the hand hygiene initiative entitled “A Year of Cleaner and Safer Care”.
During a televised ceremony held at the Department of Health’s Public Health Laboratory Centre, the Acting Director of Health, Dr P Y Leung, addressed the participants, and the Chairman of the Scientific Committee on Infection Control of the Centre for Health Protection, Dr WH Seto, gave presentation on the efforts to promote hand hygiene in both the hospital and community healthcare environment in Hong Kong.
In his speech, Dr Leung summarised the series of programmes launched by the Hong Kong Government to promote hand hygiene as an effective mean against the spread of infectious diseases in our healthcare facilities and community setting.
“The Department of Health has established a Task Force to promote hand hygiene. The Task Force comprises experts and representatives from the Government, Hospital Authority, local medical associations, private hospitals as well as the traditional Chinese medicine sector.
“With the support of our stakeholders, we organised many publicity and educational activities. As a result, hand hygiene is promoted to a vast number of healthcare workers in different healthcare settings.
“For more specific examples, we promoted the use of WHO alcohol based formulation by making the alcohol handrub in-house and distribute to our healthcare partners for free. We also had invited Prof Didier Pittet to give a seminar in Hong Kong earlier in April. More than 300 healthcare workers attended this seminar.
“On the scientific front, we conducted research projects in public hospitals and clinics to collect data on hand hygiene practice, examine the effectiveness of multifaceted hand hygiene promotion activities, and test the acceptability of the WHO alcohol handrub formulae by our healthcare colleagues. We also documented factors affecting the practice of hand hygiene, and the experience encountered during the implementation of hand hygiene promotion,” he said.
Hong Kong signed the pledge for the WHO initiative in October last year to show its commitment to promoting good hand hygiene.
