Hand skin health; missed problem associated with the Covid-19 pandemic: evaluation of menopause women based on WHO standard

Importance of hand hygiene with the COVID-19 has been raised around the world from 2019. We aimed to determine the effect of hand skin health in menopausal women during the covid-19 pandemic.

It was a cross-sectional study which has conducted on 94 subjects those were referred to menopause clinic in Imam Khomeini Hospital in Ahvaz city during September to November 1999. The tools of this study were the Personal Characteristics Questionnaire and Hand and skin self-assessment tool (Appendix 3 of “WHO GUIDELINES ON HAND HYGIENE IN HEALTH CARE “). Data has entered and analyzed by using software SPSS version 22. The level of significance was considered as less than 0.05.

The mean age of women participating in the study was 53.6. The average frequency of hand washing outdoors was 5.28 and 10.43 indoors. Most women (94.7%) had reported at least some degree of skin problem and reported that their hand skin problems increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Finding this study has shown that about 95% of women had felt at least one problem in their hands. During COVID-19 pandemic, hand washing with disinfectants were repeated more and more, furthers skin of the hands will be two times more damaged as compared to normal conditions, so the need to increase hand health training as part of general health, especially in older adults' women in advance.