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Public buildings and healthcare settings

Hospital-associated infections contribute worldwide to an important loss of resources in the health sector and to an increase of morbidity as well as to a higher mortality.¹

The literature estimates that between 5 to 30 per cent of patients a year develop one or more infections during a stay in hospital. A significant percentage of these infections could be avoided. In crisis or precarious situations the number of infections worsens.

A clean environment plays an important role in the prevention of hospital-associated infections.

Many factors, including water supply, cleaning of the health-care setting environment, waste management can significantly influence the transmission of such infections. In 1997 the proportion of Legionella cases in Europe due to nosocomial infections was 16%. The total European rate for 1997 was 3.9 cases per million population. In the same year, 136 deaths were reported – an overall case-fatality rate of 10% compared with 4.9% in 1996.²

Related publications

• Replacement of mercury thermometers and sphygmomanometers in health care
  2011 Technical guidance
• Water safety in buildings: Resource for the development of training and information material
  2011
• How to integrate water, sanitation and hygiene into HIV programmes
  2010
• Natural ventilation for infection control in health-care settings
  2009, available in English, French, and Spanish
• Water, sanitation and hygiene standards for schools in low-cost settings
  2009, available in English, French, Spanish
• Essential environmental health standards for health care
  2008, available in English, French
• Global patient safety management: Clean care is safer care
  pdf, 876kb
  2005 Report on informal briefing

Links

• Natural ventilation design project
  NATVENT project
• Clean care is safer care: Clean environment
  Address by Dr Jamie Bartram, Water, Sanitation and Health Programme

Additional information

• Legionellosis
  Fact sheet No 285, February 2005
• Management of solid health-care waste at primary health care centres

¹Orrett, F.A., Brooks, P.J., Richardson, E.G. (1998). Nosocomial infections in a rural regional hospital in developing country: infection rates by site, service, cost and infection control practices. Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.

²Legionnaires’disease in Europe, 1997; WHO weekly epidemiological record n° 34; European working group for Legionella infections, PHLS Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre, London, United Kingdom