GLOBAL HAND WASHING DAY OCTOBER 15: "CLEAN HANDS SAVE LIVES"

Today, October 15 is Global Hand Washing Day (GHD) a day set aside by the United Nations in 2008 in Stockholm to initiate Public Private Partnership for Hand Washing (PPPHW). The theme for this year is “Clean Hands Save Lives”.

Hand washing with soap and water is the most effective and inexpensive way to prevent infectious diseases as diarrheal and acute respiratory infections which take lives of children in developing countries and regions of the world. Even in healthcare, hand washing is the most effective prevention of healthcare acquired infection which is very prevalent within the healthcare space.

Hand hygiene as it is also called was discovered in the 19^th century by an Obstetrician called Ignaz Semmelweis while working at the University of Vienna. He discovered that there was a high difference regarding Puerperal fever in women in two different wards. A Puerperal infection otherwise known as puerperal sepsis is a condition that occurs when a new mom experiences an infection related to giving birth. The ward with the highest prevalence of Puerperal fever was the one where medical students and Physicians delivered the women while the other wards, the women were delivered by midwives.

He also saw that medical students and Physicians went directly from performing autopsies to delivering women. He decided to add washing hands with chlorinated lime solution for the medical students and Physicians before going into delivery wards. He saw that the incidence of Puerperal fever decreased significantly from 16% to 3% in the most affected ward. In the wards where the midwives delivered the women it stayed the same 7%. And this became the turning point in the healthcare sector where hand washing became credited as a very key component of infection control. Now you know why we take it so seriously.

As we mark the Global Hand Washing Day today, please remember to tell someone hand washing save lives. Educate someone to wash hands after using the toilets, wash hands before and after food, wash hands before and after touching a sick person, wash hands before and after touching a broken skin. We cannot afford to add to the statistics, let’s just wash hands because it really costs us nothing.

Enjoy the rest of the hand washing day.

ehi@ohsm.com.ng

STRESS: AN IGNORED HEALTH RISK YET PRESENT WITH US

An issue i have been learning about and researching on lately is the issue of stress.

This has become a very key issue in our daily lives leading to cardiovascular diseases, burn outs, suicidal ideation, sleep disorders, obesity and even diabetes type 1 ans 2.

We all know the word stress without necessarily understanding what it truly means. "Stress simply put is your inability or lack of enough resources to deal with the demands the environment is placing on you". So stress is not only a condition of high demand but also a condition of low resources.

An imbalance is created when the demands placed in an organism is not in proportion with the organism's resources to respond. This imbalance situation comes in two folds. You have a situation where demands  are too high in relation to the resources we have, we will experience too active or overactive life. Another situation is when the demand is actually too low in relation to our resources, in this case we will feel so underutilized and feel a huge sense of frustration. This is because we have too much energy, too much aspirations, too many abilities that are not realized because we have no room for that. These two conditions are what puts us in stressful situations.

Stress in a general term is not all bad if :

• You have the resources to deal with it
• If it is just for a short term. It becomes bad when it persists for too long

Stress could either be acute or chronic. As a matter of fact stress is a condition caused by acute or chronic imbalance between demand and resources.

We have two types of stress namely:

• Eustress which is the good stress
• Distress which is the bad stress

One of the highest contributors to non communicable diseases (NCD) globally is stress, everyone is mutually stressed and we most times do nothing about it until it has sparked up many other health conditions.

Business executives are too busy to talk about stress, they do not see stress management as part of their business continuity plan neither do they at all look into the issue of stress within their organisations. Employees are present at work yet not able to deliver on their tasks and optimal production is far fetched. The issue most of these organisations are faced with today has moved from staff absenteeism due to ill health to presenteeism, no psychosocial support, absence of management support to deal with the issue of organisational stress. We must note that organisations do not exist in isolation, it is called organisation because of careful assemblage and harmonization (organisation) of all available resources needed to achieve the goal of the organisation. So if employees are an integral part of that resources and when they get stressed, the organisation will also be stressed. We all pretend to come to work yet deep within us, we are psychologically not present and this tells so much on our productivity yet it goes unnoticed because there are even to structures to measure and compare employees motivation and productivity.

We need to look at the threats in workplaces, we need to measure the health performance of our employees. We need to realign the whole work processes before we all kill our best hands and who are already emotionally stressed. Demand has been much on them and they having given so much that they have nothing to give anymore, they at this point become emotionally stressed psychologically hurt, we need to release them.

I will stop here and ask you top lease  follow me if you do not mind on this blog, i will be treating this issue in details in subsequent weeks linking it with sleep disorder (Insomnia, dyssomnia and apnea), the need to be physically active, the effect of built environment on health and benefits afterwards.

You can contact at ehi@ohsm.com.ng