World Hand Hygiene Day 2021 – Teal mobile sinks

Seconds save lives – clean your hands!

World Hand Hygiene Day is celebrated every year on the 5th May. The campaign, which first began in 2009, has a focus of bringing people together by maintaining worldwide “promotion, visibility and sustainability” of effective hand hygiene.

And in these pandemic wracked times, sustainable hand washing is of course, more important than ever!

The focus for 2021 has turned to healthcare facilities and workers, with the World Health Organization (WHO) being concerned with the area or place where three key elements coexist: “the patient, the health care worker, and care or treatment involving contact with the patient or their surroundings.”

“For World Hand Hygiene Day 2021, WHO calls on health care workers and facilities to achieve effective hand hygiene action at the point of care.”

The WHO’s SAVE LIVES – clean your hands campaign has a central core – that “all health-care workers should clean their hands at the right time and in the right way.”

“Wash hands when visibly soiled.”

WHO’s How to Handwash poster can be downloaded here.

The Your 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene poster advises medical personnel that handwashing is essential

Before touching a patient
Before clean/ aseptic procedure
After body fluid exposure risk
After touching a patient
After touching patient surroundings.

#HandHygiene #CleanYourHands #InfectionPrevention

And as the campaign states,

“Sustaining the efforts to improve patient safety requires dedicated action and innovation both of which are now more crucial than ever.”