admin | May 1, 2023
World Hand Hygiene Day is May 5.
Each year, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands campaign calls on everyone to be inspired by the global movement to achieve universal health coverage, achieving better health and well-being for all people at all ages, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health care services, and access to safe, effective, quality, and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all.
Infection prevention and control, including hand hygiene, is critical to achieving universal health coverage as it is a practical and evidence-based approach with demonstrated impact on quality of care and patient safety across all levels of the health system.
As part of a major global effort to improve hand hygiene in health care, led by WHO to support health-care workers, the SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands annual global campaign was launched in 2009.
The central core of SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands is that all health-care workers should clean their hands at the right time and in the right way.
SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands incorporates a global annual day to focus on the importance of improving hand hygiene in health care, with WHO providing support for these efforts. A suite of hand hygiene improvement tools and materials have been created. The tools aim to help translate a multimodal strategy for improving and sustaining hand hygiene in health care into practice.
For access to various tools and documents related to hand hygiene and World Hand Hygiene Day, see: https://www.who.int/campaigns/world-hand-hygiene-day