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.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) calls on everyone to be inspired by the global movement to achieve universal health coverage (UHC), 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 UHC 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 healthcare workers, the SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands annual global campaign was launched in 2009 and was a natural extension of the WHO First Global Patient Safety Challenge: Clean Care is Safer Care work which is now WHO IPC global unit.
The central core of SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands is that all healthcare workers should clean their hands at the right time and in the right way.
WHO SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands annual initiative is part of a major global effort led by the World Health Organization (WHO) to support healthcare workers to improve hand hygiene in health care and thus support the prevention of often life-threatening HAI.
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 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 the translation to the practice of a multimodal strategy for improving and sustaining hand hygiene in health care. – The Vibes, May 5, 2021
