Adopting World Health Organization Multimodal Infection Prevention and Control Strategies to Respond to COVID-19, Kenya

Abstract

The World Health Organization advocates a multimodal approach to improving infection prevention and control (IPC) measures, which Kenya adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Kenya Ministry of Health formed a national IPC committee for policy and technical leadership, coordination, communication, and training. During March–November 2020, a total of 69,892 of 121,500 (57.5%) healthcare workers were trained on IPC. Facility readiness assessments were conducted in 777 health facilities using a standard tool assessing 16 domains. A mean score was calculated for each domain across all facilities. Only 3 domains met the minimum threshold of 80%. The Ministry of Health maintained a national list of all laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections. By December 2020, a total of 3,039 healthcare workers were confirmed to be SARS-CoV-2–positive, an infection rate (56/100,000 workers) 12 times higher than in the general population. Facility assessments and healthcare workers' infection data provided information to guide IPC improvements.

Keywords

• COVID-19
• pandemic
• SARS-CoV-2
• infection control
• World Health Organization
• coronavirus disease