Water Sanitation and Health
Our vision and mission are the attainment by all peoples of the lowest possible burden of water and sanitation-related disease through primary prevention.
Sanitary inspections for drinking-water supplies
A sanitary inspection is a simple but powerful on-site risk assessment tool that can help to identify priority risk factors in drinking-water supplies. Sanitary inspections, which typically use a yes/no checklist (called a sanitary inspection form), can be applied in resource constrained settings, and are therefore well suited to small water supplies.
Sanitary inspection supports the implementation of key recommendations within WHO’s Guidelines for drinking-water quality: small water supplies, and can be used for:
- drinking-water quality surveillance - supporting progressive improvement for individual water supplies, and informing national and subnational policies and programming; and
- risk management – supporting water safety planning, or in certain contexts, providing a basic alternative to a full water safety plan (WSP).
Sanitary inspection can complement water quality monitoring – the results of the two activities can be jointly analysed to assess the overall safety of a drinking-water supply. Applied on its own, sanitary inspection can still provide important information to inform safe drinking-water management.
Sanitary inspection packages
WHO has developed sanitary inspection packages for a range of small water supply scenarios. The packages consist of a sanitary inspection form, which is supported by a technical fact sheet and management advice sheet, to help ensure the ongoing safe management of small water supplies, in line with WSP principles.
The packages can be used by field-based practitioners representing communities, water suppliers, health authorities, regulators and other stakeholders. A basic level of training on their use is important to help ensure consistent and accurate results.
The individual sanitary inspection packages can be downloaded below. Each package is available in PDF format, and also in an editable format to assist with adaptation.
Download all 13 sanitary inspection packages in an editable format.
For further information on sanitary inspections, see the publication Sanitary inspection packages - a supporting tool for the Guidelines for drinking-water quality: small water supplies.
