Only 40% of world’s health facilities meet basic sanitation standards – UN

Only four in 10 healthcare facilities worldwide meet basic sanitation standards for accessible and usable toilets, the United Nations said Tuesday, while 11 percent have no sanitation services at all.

In a report, the UN’s health and children’s agencies said only 40 percent of healthcare facilities last year had toilets that adequately met the needs of patients and staff, including people with limited mobility.

The report from the World Health Organization and UNICEF for the first time provided global estimates of basic sanitation services in healthcare settings.

Its 2025 estimate found significant gaps in access to basic sanitation standards, which it said required usable facilities including at least one toilet dedicated to staff, at least one sex-separated toilet with menstrual hygiene facilities and at least one toilet accessible for people with limited mobility.

Relying on data from 70 countries, the report showed that sanitation levels in healthcare facilities varied widely between regions, with only 23 percent of facilities in sub-Saharan Africa providing basic services, compared to 55 percent in central and southern Asia.

It found there was no sanitation service at more than one in 10 health facilities globally, serving 936 million people.

In addition to sanitation, the report estimated access in healthcare facilities to water, hygiene, environmental cleaning and waste management.

It found that an estimated 85 percent of facilities last year had basic water services, 72 percent had basic hygiene services and 71 percent basic healthcare waste management services.

Only 59 percent of facilities meanwhile met basic so-called environmental cleaning standards, which require both cleaning protocols and trained cleaning staff and is core to infection prevention and control.

A full 18 percent of facilities, serving around 1.5 billion people, met neither of the environmental cleaning requirements, said the report, which for this category relied on data from 54 countries.

The situation is particularly dire in poorer countries.

The environmental cleaning standard was met by just 24 percent of facilities in the world’s least-developed nations.