Research priorities to strengthen environmental cleaning in healthcare facilities: the CLEAN Group Consensus.

Environmental cleaning is essential to patient and health worker safety, yet it is a substantially neglected area in terms of knowledge, practice, and capacity-building, especially in resource-limited settings. Public health advocacy, research and investment are urgently needed to develop and implement cost-effective interventions to improve environmental cleanliness and, thus, overall healthcare quality and safety. We outline here the CLEAN Group Consensus exercise yielding twelve urgent research questions, grouped into four thematic areas: standards, system strengthening, behaviour change, and innovation.

BSAC Vanguard Series: Clean water-the world's best medicine for disease and drug-resistant infection.

As stated by the WHO, without urgent action we are heading for a 'post-antibiotic era', in which common infections and minor injuries will again prove fatal, as they did in the past. How do we get millions of people to change their use of antimicrobials to avoid this terrifying outcome? There is one very effective measure that we can take: making access to clean water and sanitation universal. Billions of the world's population still lack access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation.

What COVID-19 Reveals about the Neglect of WASH within Infection Prevention in Low-Resource Healthcare Facilities.

The highly infectious nature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus requires rigorous infection prevention and control (IPC) to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 within healthcare facilities, but in low-resource settings, the lack of water access creates a perfect storm for low-handwashing adherence, ineffective surface decontamination, and other environmental cleaning functions that are critical for IPC compliance. Data from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme show that one in four healthcare facilities globally lacks a functional water source on premises (i.e.