By Abiodun Abegunde
Isolo General Hospital (IGH) on Tuesday trained its health workers on hand hygiene, to mark 2026 World Hand Hygiene Day.
The Medical Director of the hospital, Dr Olugbenga Oseni, said that the hospital had continued to train and retrain its health workers.
Oseni said that the theme for 2026 Hand Hygiene Day was “Action Saves Life”.
He said that hand hygiene was a practice that had been on but became more heightened with the outbreak of COVID-19.
He noted that hand hygiene was integral in combating COVID-19 .
“We have continued to train and retrain our health workers in IGH, and we have a new training session which I informed the Invention Prevention and Control (IPC) unit to allow it to align with today’s session of training for staff .
“Hand hygiene protects you from infection, from the patient, healthcare provider and from the public, depending on the level of contact and type of infection transmission.
“Once you have infections like that, that have to do with contact, the chances of new transmission are very high.
“So, we talked of hand washing and use of hand sanitiser, use of hands gloves; all these are efforts to put a barrier to the spread of infections and diseases.”
He said, “Doing all the things enumerated helps to keep safe and breaks the continuation of infection.
“So, even for a patient or an individual that has infections, once they do good hand hygiene, the chances of transmitting to other people are very low and for the people that are taking care of them too,
“Once they use and wear their gloves properly, or mask depending on whom they are dealing with, that also breaks barrier for the spread of infection” he said.
Oseni emphasised that to stop the spread of infection hand hygiene was important.
“When you wash your hand properly, with or without soap, the chances are that the germs on your hand would reduce.
“That also comes to the care of the hands; if you keep long nails, and you don’t take care of them, you harbour a lot of germs and the chances of spreading it, even to yourself.
He said that the IPC committee in the hospital had been monitoring the level of compliance noting that they had new staffs coming in.
“So, we try to update the new set of staff to improve compliance and we try to provide things that they need to comply with.”
Speaking, the IPC Focal Person at IGH, Dr Safiyyah Miftah, said that everyone had realised that hand washing or hand hygiene was an action that helped to protect individuals and families from infections in the home, hospital and community.
Miftah, a Consultant Family Physician, said, “Hand hygiene also serves as high impact, low cost intervention for preventing communicable diseases.
“The level of awareness is high because during the epidemic, there was a lot of promotions on hand hygiene.
“But I must say that now, the level of awareness is not really there because people believe that hand hygiene is associated with poverty, disease and outbreaks.
“That’s why we have to celebrate to remind people that hand hygiene is a continuous practice because the prevention of infection is an ongoing process at every point of care both in the hospital and at home.
“In the hospital, we have continuous medical education where we talk about hand hygiene, nurses training and IPC trainings, ” she said.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the training of health workers in the hospital touched on areas of compliance, awareness and monitoring.
A Consultant Paediatrician, Dr Funmilola Showunmi, enlightened the health care workers on steps to hand washing.
Showunmi, who is also the Head of
Pediatrics Department, IGH, said the use of gloves did not replace the need to wash one’s hands.
She enlightened them on how to improve compliance, how health workers should be educated, what beliefs hindered hand hygiene and why healthcare workers did not practise hand hygiene.
She also enlightened them on the five moments for hand hygiene and implored them not to run their hands on their clothes after washing. (NAN)
Edited by Vivian Ihechu
