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Research shows doctors need to improve hygiene

Institute of Occupational Safety and Health researchers said yesterday that the results of a recent survey showed that hospitals and medical professionals need to improve hygiene and safety procedures.

In addition to showing that clinical medical staff are more likely to suffer from infectious disease across the board compared with administrative medical staff, the surveyed revealed some lapses in hygiene that might surprise some.

The institute, which operates under the Council of Labor Affairs (CLA), got serious about the risk biohazards pose to medical professionals in the wake of the SARS epidemic in 2003, said Chen Chiou-jung (陳秋蓉) at yesterday's press conference at the CLA. The survey, the first conducted by the institute on this issue, sampled 5,224 clinical medical professionals and 1,919 administrative medical professionals.

The results found that 1.1 percent of clinical professionals such as doctors and nurses, said they had become infected with tuberculosis in their career, almost three times the percentage of administrators who said the same, 0.4 percent.

Clinical professionals are also more likely to contract a host of infectious diseases from hepatitis B to pneumonia to dermatitis, the survey showed.

Accidental contamination from used needles may also be a source of infection, said the researchers, as 71.5 percent of nursing staff said they had been accidentally pricked by sharp medical implements, most often when putting protective covers back on needles.

Although the institute study was designed with safeguarding the health of medical professionals in mind, some findings in the study had ramifications for hospital-goers as well.

Only 2.7 percent of doctors said they put on a clean white robe every day.

While most doctors said they washed their robes at least once a week, 13.5 percent of doctors say they didn't launder their robes more than once a month and 29.5 percent said they washed their robes once every two or three weeks.

"Doctors wear their robes all day long. They see patients. They eat lunch," Chen said. "But because it goes over their street clothes they somehow don't think of it as getting dirty."

"Instead, they take off the robe at the end of the day and hang it on a hook until tomorrow," he said.

Chen said that bigger hospitals are no better than smaller clinics when it comes to making sure doctors wear clean robes.

"It's all down to management, and often smaller places are easier to manage," said Chen.

The deputy director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Lin Ting (林頂) told the Taipei Times by telephone that the CDC regularly monitors hospitals' risk of spreading disease.

"We don't go into the details, like how often robes are washed," he said, "although maintaining good hygiene should be the basic responsibility of any hospital."

However, the center measures other criteria such as the number of drug-resistant bacteria strains present in the hospital or whether the hospital provides adequate hand-washing facilities.
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