WHO Tweeted That Cleaning Your Hands Correctly Can Help Save Lives

Cleaning your hands is one of the most effective measures in reducing the spread of germs and avoiding infections. Lack of hand hygiene is one of the main causes of avoidable infection & associated deaths in health care. healthcare workers need to clean their hands at the right times.

Hundreds of millions of people are affected by avoidable infections in health care. 1 in 10 infected patients die every year.

Effective infection prevention and control measures prevent up to 70% of infections acquired in health care. When healthcare workers unite for safety and promote hand hygiene, they protect patients and save lives. When a health facility’s “quality and safety climate or culture” values hand hygiene and infection prevention and control, this results in both patients and health workers feeling protected and cared for.

To prioritize clean hands in health facilities, people at all levels need to believe in the importance of hand hygiene and infection prevention and control to save lives, by acting as key players in achieving the appropriate behaviors and attitudes towards it. In other words, health workers at all levels and people accessing health care facilities need to unite on ensuring clean hands.

This year’s theme for World Hand Hygiene Day, 5 May 2022, is focused on recognizing that we can add to a facility’s climate or culture of safety and quality through cleaning our hands but also that a strong quality and safety culture will encourage people to clean hands at the right times and with the right products.

Each year the SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands campaign aims to progress the goal of maintaining a global profile on the importance of hand hygiene in health care and to ‘bring people together in support of hand hygiene improvement globally.

WHO calls on everyone to be inspired by the global movement to achieve universal health coverage, i.e. achieving better health and well-being for all people of 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 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.

Over To You:
Unite, talk and work together on hand hygiene for high quality safer care everywhere.