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Australian doctors fail to meet standards for hand hygiene at height of pandemic: report

(Xinhua)    14:06, December 17, 2020

CANBERRA, Dec. 17 (Xinhua) -- Australia's doctors and ambulance workers failed to meet national standards for hand hygiene at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, a report has found.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) on Thursday published a report on health services in 2019-20.

It revealed that only 79.5 percent of doctors and 74.5 percent of ambulance workers captured in the audit of the public hospital system washed or sanitized their hands when required when the first wave peaked between April and June -- below the benchmark of 80 percent.

In response, President of the Australian Medical Association (AMA) Omar Khorshid acknowledged that there was room for improvement.

"Unfortunately, we as doctors have to acknowledge sometimes we are not as good as nurses, for instance, at following protocols and doing what we're told," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

"It is a bit of a wake-up call for the whole medical profession to lift our game and make sure we are participating in this really important hospital quality and safety initiative."

However, compliance with hand hygiene standards in Australian hospitals is generally good, with national benchmarks routinely met, according to the report.

The report found that Australians avoided hospitals between March and June and that more Australians were taking prescription medications.

The number of presentations at emergency departments was down 38 percent in March and the number of elective surgeries performed fell from 15,300 nationally in the week starting March 16 to 4,800 by the week starting April 13.

Data across a range of mental health-related services show heightened service usage since March 20 when COVID-19 pandemic restrictions were introduced.

"Phone and online support organizations reported substantial increases in demand for their services during the COVID-19 pandemic," AIHW spokesman Adrian Webster said in a media release on Thursday.

Khorshid said the data reiterated the importance of having a well-resourced mental health support system.

"General Practitioners were reporting during the lockdown, very high rates of very distressed patients presenting either by telehealth or in person to their clinics," he said.

"So the high rates of prescription are a sign of what's been going on in our community."

(For the latest China news, Please follow People's Daily on Twitter and Facebook)(Web editor: Meng Bin, Bianji)

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