Anderson, DM, Cronk, R, Fejfar, D et al. (3 more authors) (2021) Safe Healthcare Facilities: A Systematic Review on the Costs of Establishing and Maintaining Environmental Health in Facilities in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18 (2). 817. p. 817. ISSN 1660-4601
Abstract
A hygienic environment is essential to provide quality patient care and prevent healthcare-acquired infections. Understanding costs is important to budget for service delivery, but costs evidence for environmental health services (EHS) in healthcare facilities (HCFs) is lacking. We present the first systematic review to evaluate the costs of establishing, operating, and maintaining EHS in HCFs in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We systematically searched for studies costing water, sanitation, hygiene, cleaning, waste management, personal protective equipment, vector control, laundry, and lighting in LMICs. Our search yielded 36 studies that reported costs for 51 EHS. There were 3 studies that reported costs for water, 3 for sanitation, 4 for hygiene, 13 for waste management, 16 for cleaning, 2 for personal protective equipment, 10 for laundry, and none for lighting or vector control. Quality of evidence was low. Reported costs were rarely representative of the total costs of EHS provision. Unit costs were infrequently reported. This review identifies opportunities to improve costing research through efforts to categorize and disaggregate EHS costs, greater dissemination of existing unpublished data, improvements to indicators to monitor EHS demand and quality necessary to contextualize costs, and development of frameworks to define EHS needs and essential inputs to guide future costing.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | healthcare facilities; environmental health; water sanitation and hygiene; WaSH; waste management; cleaning; infection prevention and control; costing; finance; economic |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Civil Engineering (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 26 Apr 2021 13:39 |
Last Modified: | 26 Apr 2021 13:39 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | MDPI |
Identification Number: | 10.3390/ijerph18020817 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:173364 |