“Save Lives: Clean Your Hands” day coming soon

Posted by Charlotte Salter, on April 19, 2012.

This year’s Save Lives: Clean Your Hands day is taking place on 5th May. The campaign is led by the World Health Organization (WHO) as part of a major global effort to improve hand hygiene in health care.

If you work in health care and would like to get involved, the WHO has provided hand hygiene improvement tools and materials which can be downloaded here. For schoolteachers interested in educating children about the importance of handwashing, UKCPI has developed the popular Hooray for Handwashing material which is available here.

Save Lives: Clean Your Hands is an annual initiative which aims to support health care workers to improve hand hygiene in health care, and avoid often life threatening Hospital Acquired Infections. The central core of the campaign is that all health care workers should clean their hands at the right time and in the right way.

The initiative 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 from a base of existing research and evidence and from rigorous testing, as well as working closely with a range of experts in the field. The tools aim to help put into practice a strategy for improving and sustaining hand hygiene in health care.

This initiative is part of the WHO Patient Safety First Global Patient Safety Challenge, ‘Clean Care is Safer Care’ programme aimed at reducing Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI) worldwide, which was launched in October 2005. So far, Clean Care is Safer Care has focused on the importance of clean hands in health care. The programme has galvanised action at many levels including 124 Ministers of Health pledging commitment to reducing HAI and to support the work of WHO.

About UKCPI
UKCPI
 provides expert and balanced information about cleaning and hygiene in the home and in the workplace. Find out more at www.ukcpi.org

Contact the UKCPI on ukcpi@ukcpi.org or call 07843 199397.