Protecting health workers from biological hazards: Success stories and good practices

Introduction    Globally, health care facilities employ over 59 million workers who are exposed to a complex array of health and safety hazards. In 2003, WHO conducted a pilot in Vietnam, Tanzania and South Africa, producing the toolkit “Protecting Health Care Workers (HCWs) from Needlestick injuries",  WHO Collaborating Centers are working with WHO Regional Offices, governments and Public Health Institutions and cooperating countries in implementing the “Preventing Occupational Transmission of Bloodborne Pathogens among HCWs” project.  This project applies the hierarchy of controls using four key components: a “Train-the-Trainer” programme using the WHO/NIOSH toolkit; surveillance system for sharps injuries (EPINet); Hepatitis B immunization of health workers campaigns and training for the evaluation and selection of sharps with safety features to prevent injuries.  These project implementations have produced 13,000 trainers in Latin-America, 700 in Middle Eastern countries and over 7000 in Africa for a total of approximately 20,000 trainers who have received the training trough the train-the-trainer approach so far globally.    

Objectives    The objectives of this session are to share lessons learned and best practices between countries having already implemented the WHO/NIOSH Toolkit on protecting HCWs, preventing needle-stick injuries and occupational exposure to biological hazards and to ultimately produce a publication summarizing all the experiences made and success stories from the participating countries to this congress.    

Methodology    Participants from Latin America, Africa, China, Caribbean and Europe will give a short presentation on what occupational health hazards healthcare workers face in their respective countries, what the motivation was to initiate the HCWs protection project, what policy advocacy efforts were successful, what changes were made, number of people trained and outcomes realized. Participants will be grouped in work-table sessions for discussion. A raporteur will gather all the information for publication and sharing purposes. The overall session time will be 3 hours.