Coronavirus: Hygiene ‘blind spot’ for healthcare staff

Australia needs to urgently focus on increased surface cleaning in hospitals, aged-care facilities and public areas.

A team carries their drones after spraying disinfectants in Ahmedabad in India last month. Picture: AFP

Australia has developed a dangerous blind spot in its fight against COVID-19 and needs to urgently focus on increased surface cleaning in hospitals, aged-care facilities and public areas, medical experts have warned.

The coronavirus can live up to nine days on some surfaces and the warning about regular thorough cleaning must be added to the widely understood measures of hand hygiene and social distancing.

Anand Deva, head of the Surgical Infection Research Group Faculty at Macquarie University, said standards of environmental cleaning had become a huge problem and efforts to tackle it now have come too late.

About 10 per cent of patients contract a secondary infection in Australian hospitals, a reality Professor Deva said was unacceptable and preventable.

“To eliminate the virus from Australia, we need to look at everything. It’s not just about social distancing, every single weapon needs to be used,” Professor Deva said. “Reading between the lines of the situation at Newmarch House is standards of cleaning, but I can’t help think they are being looked at a little too late.”

He said simple measures such as stripping curtains and deep-cleaning the fibres of carpets were usually not considered where there were large concentrations of sick people and dangerous viruses.

“Ironically, in intensive care units where you have some of the sickest people in hospital, there are reservoirs of bacteria and virus that are multi-resistant in pockets around the patients. This is why there needs to be a tightening of cleaning protocols in hospitals,” Professor Deva said.

“This is an issue of adequate cleaning, decontamination and disinfection, which is becoming increasingly critical in healthcare and aged-care facilities.”

Mary-Louise McLaws, a professor of epidemiology, hospital infections and infectious diseases control at the University of NSW, said coronavirus reinforced the importance of hand hygiene and ramping up environmental cleaning to prevent further infection.

Professor McLaws, a member of a World Health Organisation advisory panel on emergency ­responses to COVID-19, said ­although hand hygiene practices would appear as exemplary once auditors release hospital results, it was difficult for healthcare workers to maintain levels of hand sanitation if they had not become a practised habit.

“Healthcare workers often fail to think about the basic infection control measures of hand hygiene because they’re too busy focusing on other things,” she said.

Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care clinical director Anne Duggan said coronavirus has reminded healthcare workers of the very basic procedures of hand and environmental hygiene and how dramatically they can prevent the transmission of viruses.